Fishman, Joshua A. (1926-)

Joshua A. Fishman's contributions to the field of bilingual education span more than half a century. His own personal and scholarly experience with bilingual education might have spurred Fishman's intellectual creativity as the founder of what has become the field of sociology of language, or Fishmanian sociolinguistics. A review of his roles in bilingual education marks him clearly as a visionary linguist: a supporter of bilingual education as enrichment for one and all, an advocate for the Bilingual Education Act, a critic of Title VII ideology, and a scholar interested in the role that bilingual education plays throughout the world in supporting minority languages and communities. This entry describes some of Fishman's contributions to bilingual education

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Joshua A. Fishman attended the Yiddish Workmen's Circle Schools, supplementary Yiddish schools that had a linguistic and secular function. These schools armed him with a commitment to the development of minority languages, especially Yiddish, and a pro-proletariat activism. He went on to teach in elementary and secondary Jewish secular schools while pursuing his doctorate in social psychology and education at Columbia University. It is not surprising, therefore, that his first book in English was titled Bilin-gualism in a Yiddish School: Some Correlates and Non-Correlates.

Fishman's first major book, Language Loyalty in the United States: The Maintenance and Perpetuation of non-English Mother Tongues by American Ethnic and Religious Groups (published in 1966), includes a chapter on what he calls ethnic-mother-tongue schools; these are bilingual education day and supplementary schools run by ethnolinguistic communities—groups of a particular ethnicity, usually regarded also as linguistic minorities. The influence of his work on the passage of the Bilingual Education Act in 1968 was paramount. He testified in the hearings, and his work was frequently cited. Fishman proposed the word transitional to substitute for compensatory, a term that has since been adopted by policymakers and scholars alike. After the passage of the Bilingual Education Act in 1968, Fishman devoted a great deal of personal and scholarly attention to the topic. In the early 1970s, he and his wife, Gella Schweid Fishman, served as consultants for a Title VII Bilingual Education Curriculum Center at the New York City Board of Education. Between 1970 and 1985, he published 15 important articles on bilingual education as well as three significant books—Bilingual Education: An International Sociological Perspective (1976); Bilingual Education: Current Perspectives, Volume 1: Social Science (1977); and Bilingual Education for Hispanic Students in the United States.

In his 1976 book, Fishman proposed four of the principles of bilingual education that summarize his ideology on the topic:

• 1.
  Bilingual education is good for the majority group.
• 2.
  Bilingual education is good for the minority group.
• 3.
  Bilingual education is good for education.
• 4.
  Bilingual education is good for language learning and language teaching.

His insistence that “poor little rich kids” need bilingual education most leads him to promote enrichment bilingual education for all, proposing what we know today as two-way dual-language education. Fishman warned of its limitations by asserting the following:

Fishman believes that bilingual education is good for several reasons: It provides for multiple memberships and for multiple loyalties in an integrative fashion. It equalizes the children of marked- and unmarked-language backgrounds. Bilingual education can also afford economic possibilities to bilinguals. He has predicted the growth of bilingual education in the future, as local languages are given increased educational recognition, and world languages, especially English, are gaining wider currency.

...