THE MASTERS OF SURVIVAL SEND THEIR CHILDREN TO SCHOOL:* BILINGUAL EDUCATION IN THE ETHNIC SCHOOLS OF MIAMI

Abstract

Called Masters of Survival by their most perceptive student (Llanes 1982), the Cubans of Dade County, Florida, present to researchers on ethnic education a subject rich in its poten tial for insight. As in any other community, Cuban children in Dade County go to all kinds of schools, public and private, religious and lay, where approaches vary greatly to both curriculum and use of language. But a surprising number of working-class and middle-class Cuban children attend schools that are small, inexpensive, and bilingual. We call them private ethnic schools to distinguish them from the more familiar private elite schools attended by the children of professionals and the rich and which, in Miami as elsewhere, are frequently also bilingual. We report on Dade County's private ethnic schools on the basis of on-site research conducted during 1983 using both school documents and extensive interviews with teachers, parents, and administrators. We report, in addition, from the privileged perspective of sharing a Cuban identity and the Spanish language with the educators whose schools we studied. And we write, moreover, from the perspective of long acquaintance with many forms of public and private bilingual educa tion in the United States. Many aspects of private ethnic schools are worth studying. We look at the general nature ? and general effectiveness ? of the schools. But we concentrate mostly on the bilingual aspect of the schools, particularly the relationship of the ethnic language, Spanish, to English. In tone and substance, this is an upbeat report. It is intended to highlight and disseminate information about a highly successful type of ethnic school and to add to the growing, if often ignored, literature on effective forms of bilingual education. We offer here a history, as well as a current description, of private ethnic schools in Dade County; we also consider the people who own them, their ideas about education, and their stated motives and purposes in opening and running these schools. Several comparisons run through the text. We compare the Cuban community of Miami to the Hispanic communities in other cities in the United States. We contrast the role of Spanish in Cuban private ethnic schools to the role it plays in Dade County public schools and in the

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