Guest Column
Latino Education: Content Changes
By Manuel Hernandez/HispanicVista.com
December 19, 2005
When you look at United States Latino’s leading magazines, you cannot help to see how much we Latinos have ignored significant and in-depth content changes to our traditional mindsets. Sections like business, “cultura” and technology are all over the Table of Contents. What about education? Why is it so difficult to understand that without an education, Latinos risk their social, economic and political voice in America? Why are we so stuck up in distractions and entertainment while our one-million high school Latino population faces a new SAT and other advanced city, national and state mandatory testing requirements without having the motivation, preparation, encouragement and skills needed to pass these exams?
For Latinos to have a pro-active role in the world of business (global entrepreneurship), technology (high-tech enterprise) and science, the American educational system must consider the academic needs of the great wave of Latino teen immigrants who are left out of any kind of academic opportunity because they lack the language and reading and writing skills necessary to walk into the American world of opportunities. Without concrete and specific content changes to the English curriculum, Latinos will continue to score poorly and advance slowly and lag behind in their quest of the American Dream.
Major milestones have been reached, but we cannot take for granted the fact that we have accomplished so much with so little. The new America is fencing its borders, and we Latinos must fence up our voice and demand content changes to the English curriculum in the United States. Hey, even the United States Department of Education has opened an Office (White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans) that is designing, coordinating and finding ways to improve the educational excellence of Latino children. But the content changes must occur within our community not without, no pun intended.
When will those publishers who they themselves struggled, hustled and worked extra hard to get published today, call for a nationwide Latino leader education summit? When will they publish “scholarly work” written by Latino academics and scholars instead of highlighting the curves and breasts of Latina models and actresses in their front pages? I know that there are so many issues: immigration, violence, security, home ownership, teen pregnancy, entertainment, music and politics, but all of these are dependent on one: education.
- Why are we complacent with having a section on the contributions of Latinos on the Saturday Morning News? America respects its voices. It is time to speak out in harmony on the content changes in the English curriculum. This is not the work of one, but of many working together to provide teens with the opportunity that by grace we have all received; an education.
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- Contact Manuel Hernandez mannyh32@yahoo.com
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- Manuel Hernandez:
- Born and raised in Sleepy Hollow, New York in 1963. At eleven years of age, Manuel Hernandez' family moved to Puerto Rico. He finished grade school in Puerto Rico. He received his B.A. in English; secondary education at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus in 1986 and completed his M. A. in English at Herbert H. Lehman College in the Bronx, New York in 1994.
- Hernandez has presented workshops, coordinated symposiums, conducted television interviews and moderated panels on the literature written by United States based Latino writers in Puerto Rico, the United States and Mexico. He also writes commentary essays on education for several websites and newspapers in Puerto Rico and The United States. He recently published a textbook titled, Latino/a Literature in The English Classroom (Editorial Plaza Mayor, 2003). The book was nominated for Latino Book of The Year 2004. He teaches full-time in the public schools in Puerto Rico.
- His vision is to promote Latino Literature to motivate teens to read and write. Having an encounter with Latino Literature will help teens (especially Latino teens) to improve their scores on city, national and statewide exams and will prepare them for further literary analysis. Hernandez lives in Luquillo, Puerto Rico and enjoys spending his free time with his beautiful wife, Maria and his fifteen-year old son, Joey. He is a leader in the G-12 Vision at Abundant Life Church in Fajardo.