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Krus, D.J. & Brazelton, J.M. (1983) Perspectives on bilingual education in the Austrian Empire and the United States of America: is the assumption of temporal catenation of linguistic and territorial separation valid? Psychological Reports, 53, 247-254.


Perspectives on bilingual education in the Austrian Empire and the United States of America:
Is the assumption of temporal catenation of linguistic and territorial separation valid?

 David J. Krus and Joan M. Brazelton
Arizona State University

 
Summary.--Speeches of a minority representative made in the Austrian parliament between 1892 and 1907 were abstracted for statements pertaining to bilingual and multi-cultural education. Using a method of transtemporal cognitive matching, these statements were compared with statements emulating the opinions of contemporary advocates and opponents of bilingual education. Results were interpreted within the historical context of coincidence of linguistic and territorial separatism.

Present day Austria is surrounded by countries whose territories in pars or in toto once belonged to the Austrian empire. The official language of the Austrian empire was German. The policy of the Austrian government favored for many years the integrative educational system. However, toward the end of the empire, the government began to support and finance education in native languages. For example, an imperial degree of April 10, 1881, mandated the establishment of a Czech university. In both chambers of the House, some representatives made 'desperate efforts to defeat it' (Srb, 1962, p. 126) and it did not pass the Upper Chamber until February 10, 1882. Two weeks later the Emperor ratified it and the bill became law. This development was greeted by many educators who saw an opportunity to further their careers. In a personal letter, a future professor at Prague's Czech university wrote, 'It seems that there will be a Czech university in Prague before very long. I have now set about the systematic study of Czech language' (Selver, 1940, p. 102).

These and similar developments in other ethnically distinct areas preceded partitioning of the Austrian empire, precipitated by its military defeat in the First World War. Initially, the partitioning of the Austrian empire was not favored by the American public. In a message to Congress on January 8, 1918, President Wilson declared that the dismembering of the Austrian empire was not one of the war aims. The change of American public opinion and personal views of President Wilson was accomplished by concerted lobbying effort and by a series of public meetings, lectures, and articles in the press by a group clustered around Professor Thomas G. Masaryk (Shillinglaw, 1978), active in organizing Czech ethnic minorities in the United States. The lobbying efforts of the pro-partitioning party were successful. Following the massive media campaign, the climate of public opinion was made favorable to the idea. The Austrian empire was partitioned in October, 1918, and Professor Masaryk became the first president of the newly created Czechoslovak state.

Before the war, Professor Masaryk was a member of the Austrian parliament. In this capacity he delivered a series of speeches, pertaining to educational practices and problems stressing the desirability of multicultural education. For example, in his speech of July 20, 1907, he acknowledged the possible difficulties of conducting parliamentary business in nine or ten different Languages, but stressed 'how awkward it is, and what a great effort it involves, to speak in a language which is not thoroughly familiar' (Selver,1940, p. 208). In another speech in the Austrian parliament on November 18, 1892, he criticized the opponents of multicultural education as shortsighted, disregarding the 'unspeakable loss of the best national and political resources' (Selver, 1940, p. 159) which would result if ethnicity of citizens of the Austrian empire would not be supported.

Masaryk's arguments, brought in favor of the multicultural education in Austrian parliament, are similar to arguments in favor of bilingual and multicultural education made about a century later in the United States. As in the Austrian empire, the main argument of the opponents to the bilingual education is that it is divisive and that in question are primarily not educational, but political gains. The purpose of this study was to validate this argument and to suggest its ramifications.

Method

This validity study of coincidence of linguistic and territorial separatism utilized the transtemporal cognitive matching design. As suggested by Krus and Blackman (1980, p. 948), the use of this methodology assumes that 'an analyzed document is conceptualized as an imprint of a cognitive system. The structure of this system is reconstructed by some type of formal strategies, typically by a theoretical strategy with subsequent scale development by maximizing internal consistency through homogeneous keying. Provided the structure is internally consistent, a referent structure is constructed, using a comparable and theoretically relevant frame of reference. Both the target (historical) and referent (contemporal) structures are matched and their common structure is determined. Also, the degree to which the transtemporal match was successful is quantified.

The target group of items was based on readings of Masaryk's speeches in the Austrian parliament (Rychnovsky, 1930). Sentences which pertained to bilingual or multicultural education were randomly selected and rewritten in the form of agree-disagree test items. Expressions 'the United States' or 'the Southern parts of the United States' were substituted for 'Austria' or 'Austrian empire,' 'Chicano' or 'Hispanic' were substituted for 'Czech' or 'Bohemian.' The referent group of items was culled from brochures and program of study outlines printed by the Center for Bilingual and Multicultural Education at Arizona State University; some items in this group were written by the authors to assure balanced proportionality of items favoring bilingual education (11 items) and opposing it (11 items). One item (No. 16) was constructed to reflect both opinions as a part of response options. Thus constructed scale of Attitudes Toward Bilingual Education is presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Attitudes toward Bilingual Education Scale, including item Means, Standard Deviations, and indices of Item Discrimination.

Item Number and Content

Means

SD

Disc.

 1. The fundamental error in the conduct of the United States is the blind worship of a single language, erroneously regarded as the only possible foundation for its continued existence.

  .25

 .43

.50

 2. The money used to finance bilingual education could be better used to teach children how to live in the mainstream of society rather than in a ghetto.

 .40

.49

.71

 3. In the Southern parts of the United States, there are a large number of linguistically mixed areas and the minority problem is very important. To deal with this problem, proportional representation of minority groups must be achieved and an increasing measure of untrammeled self-government must be introduced.

  .57

.50

.64

 4. Bilingual education is promoting divisiveness in American society.

.56

.50

.58

 5. Attempts to create a bilingual society will promote future discord and separatist tendencies.

.54

.50

.78

 6. Bilingual ballots do not promote the understanding of election issues; they are but a thinly veiled bid for political power.

  .69

.47

.60

 7. Paying for bilingual education with taxpayers money is wrong.

.66

.47

.77

 8. The linguistic diversity in the United States should be maintained.

  .63

 .48

.60

 9. The Chicano question is the question mainly affecting the United States and its settlement, i.e., assurance of justice and equality of rights of Hispanic people would have a favorable effect on foreign policy.

  .54

 .50

  .69

10. To give a person differential treatment, using his or her ethnic group membership as a criterion, is racism.

  .37

.48

 .63

11. People who do not acknowledge a basic human right to identify with a primary ethnic group are racist.

.47

.50

.39

12. Educators who use expressions such as ‘Anglo’ and ‘Chicano’ to label some citizens of the United States betray their insensitivity to structural and linguistic properties of the English and Spanish languages.

.80

.39

.28

13. Placement of Hispanic children in an educational program in which they are taught in the Spanish language will prevent them from going beyond the twelfth grade as they will not have the English skills necessary for college.

 .28

 .45

 .46

14. Educators who promote bilingual education also promote their own financial interests.

 .55

.50

 .46

15. In order to maintain internal peace, the Hispanic people who after the Anglos are the greatest in regard to numerical strength should be granted those rights to which they are entitled not only because of their numbers, but also in a historical respect.

.77

.42

.28

16. Bilingual education (a) ultimately helps, (b) ultimately harms Hispanic children.

  .61

.49

.81

17. Persons of Hispanic origin have a valid fear that American society is trying to rob them of the cultural background.

 .44

.48

.67

18. Bilingual education provides minority children with transferable skills which will allow them to be integrated into the dominant society.

  .57

.49

.79

19. If we really to have peace and quiet, minority and proportional representation must be reaffirmed.

  .78

.42

 .71

20. Bilingual programs provide teaching positions for persons who could not otherwise make it in the open academic market.

 .66

.47

.55

21. Educators should use language of origin in regular classroom curricula to foster development of students’ historical, literary and cultural traditions.

  .47

.50

 .62

22. The American melting pot idea is inimical to the interests of primary ethnic groups and should be abandoned.

 .18

.40

.17

23. There is a difference between ethnicity understood as the preservation of separate ethnic identity and ethnicity understood as a recognition of the contribution of ethnic groups to the common American culture. The former is but a new form of racism; the later is an expression of true humanity and basic unity of all human beings.

 .30

.47

 .24

Items number 3 and 19 are based on Masaryk’s July 20, 1907 speech in the Austrian parliament. Items number 9 and 15 are based on his June 9, 1893 speech and item 1 on his November 18, 1892 parliament speech. Items number 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 14, 20, and 23 were scored in the ‘disagree’ direction. The scale of Attitudes Toward Bilingual Education was administered to a group of 42 subjects. Their average age was 34 yr. (SD = 10.46), gender of subjects was distributed about equally. The traditional subject pool of college students was avoided. Students enrolled in an advanced class on theory of psychological measurement administered the questionnaire to their friends and members of their immediate families.

Results

Item analysis of the target group of items showed that, on the average, items comprising this group were endorsed by 58 percent of subjects. The average item discrimination was .56. Cronbach's alpha was equal to .42 with a standard error of measurement equal to .95. The average endorsement of items comprising the referent group was .51 with average item discrimination equal to .54. The Cronbach's alpha for this subscale was .87 with a corresponding standard error of measurement equal to 1.71. Item difficulties, standard deviations, and item discrimination indices were listed for each item in Table 1 together with the direction of scoring.

As frequently observed, social attitudes are distributed normally, unless indications of strong social disagreement with respect to a particular issue are present. These social pressures tend to sharpen intergroup differences and result in polarized normal distribution of indices of a measured attitude. Inspection of the distribution of responses to the attitude scale showed a marked bimodality. Additional evidence of the polarization contrast effect was the mean of the total distribution of the test scores (M = 11.86, SD = 5.90) which indicated that just about one-half of subjects favored while the other half opposed bilingual education.

The transtemporal matching of the target group of political statements made between 1892 and 1907 in the Austrian parliament and the reference group of items reflecting opinions of contemporary proponents and opponents of bilingual or multicultural education, was by canonical analysis. The hypothesis tested was that there is an isomorphism between political arguments and arguments in favor of bilingual education.
The eigenvalue of the first canonical variate was equal to .857. Wilk's lambda was .011 with its corresponding significant chi squared value equal to 111.59. The canonical correlation was .926, accounting for 86% of variance of the criterion set.

Discussion

The discourse about desirability of bilingual education revolves around questions of improved classroom performance of minority children and questions pertaining to social desirability of introduction of a new instructional language into school curricula. Implicit in this controversy is a conflict between supporters of two kinds of humanistic philosophies--humanism conceived in terms of basic unity of human beings independent or incidental to the language code which happens to be in general use, and humanism understood in terms of helping behavior, directed toward members of social groups defined by using language as a criterion.
The multifaceted character of the bilingual education controversy is seldom realized. In the present study, an attempt was made to quantify issues separately from the question of classroom performance and educational gains, a single facet of this problem widely discussed in a quantitative manner so far. A prime objection to bilingual education is the generally observed coincidence of language and territorial separatism with contemporary examples of Irish, French Canadians in Quebec, and Basques. A counterargument is the case of Switzerland.

Linguistic separatism is a centrifugal, not a centripetal societal constituent. Observations of historical coincidences of language and territorial separatism in countries where other factors, favoring the separatist tendencies are also present, shows temporal order with a marked time lag between the onset of linguistic separatism and actual territorial claims. In the case of Czech separatism, this time period was more than a century. Also, for a minority to succeed in a civil war frequently serves as a catalyst or as an instrument of such a claim, perhaps dormant for several generations.
Within the discussed context of the language-separatism within the Austrian empire, it is relevant to notice that the late phase of World War I had some aspects of civil war. Professor Masaryk, aside from his academic and political activities also organized foreign legions in Russia and France, recruited from Austrian ethnic prisoners of war. The legionnaire literature is replete with stories about a legionnaire, firing a machine gun on advancing Austrian troops, suddenly noticing his father among them and vice versa. The story of Czech legions in Russia is especially interesting. After Russia concluded a separate peace with Germany and Austria, the legions, caught in the middle of civil war, retreated toward Russia’s far east, following the rails of trans-Siberian railroad. During this retreat they captured a major portion of Russia’s national treasure. Boarding British ships in Vladivostok, they carried the gold treasure of Czarist Russia to newly created Czechoslovakia.
 
The crucial issue is, however, the desirability of the proliferation of national states declined in terms of linguistic identities. Opponents of the worldwide tendency to increase the number of national states argue that in both industrial and postindustrial societies, science, technology, and commerce depend on large conglomerations of unified people. On the 'pro' side are arguments related to availability of group- support and rights to self-determination and self-realization. However, the historical evidence suggests that language-defined national identity is no guarantee of realization of these claims. In the case of the discussed language-based partitioning of Austrian empire, the consequences of this action were well described by Sir Winston Churchill (1948, p. 10): ‘There is not one of the peoples or provinces that constituted the Empire of the Hapsburgs to whom gaining their independence has not brought the tortures which ancient poets and theologians had reserved for the dammed.’

Quantitative evidence, as obtained on the basis of discussed transtemporal cognitive-matching inquiry, indicated strong coincidence of cognitive structures of supporters of bilingual education with cognitive structure of a prima facie advocate of ethnic separatism. The social importance associated with this issue and related aspects of government-sanctioned policies of bilingual and multicultural education in the long run transcends the frequently discussed issues of educational gains. These ethical, philosophical, and political aspects of bilingual education merit further quantitative scrutiny.

References

Churchill, W. (1948). The gathering storm. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Hegert, T. (1979). Die Deutschen in der Tschehoslovakei seit 1945. Wien: Hampel.
Krus, D. J., & Blackman, H. S. (1980). East-West dimensions of ideology measured by transtemporal cognitive matching. Psychological Reports, 47, 947-955.
Rychnovsky, E. (Ed.) (1930). Masaryk: Verzeichnis der in deutschen Sprache erschienenen Werke. Prag.: Staatliche Verlagsanstalt.
Selver, P. (1940). Masaryk: A biography. London: Joseph.
Shillinglaw, D. (1978). The lectures of Professor T. Masaryk at the University of Chicago. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
Srb, A. (1926). Politicke dejiny naroda Ceskebo od pocatku doby konstitucni. Praha: Otto.
Taborsky, E. (1981). President Edward Benes: Between East and West. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

The authors express their gratitude to Dr. Otto Schulmeister, publisher of the Austrian daily Die Presse for his help with location of relevant materials.

Notes

The pro-partitioning lobby was supported by a personal friend of President Wilson, industrialist C.R. Crane, who sponsored a series of Slavonic lectures at the University of Chicago, delivered by Professor Masaryk, and introduced Masaryk to President Wilson. To ingratiate himself to President Wilson, Masaryk memorized long passages from President Wilson’s speeches and writings which he cited to President Wilson, verbatim, during his frequent visits at the White House. After the war, the older son of C.R. Crane became the first United States ambassador to Czechoslovakia, his younger son became the secretary to President Masaryk and his daughter married Masaryk’s son, appointed as Czechoslovakia’s ambassador to Great Britain.

Perhaps the reader is interested whether Professor Masaryk fulfilled his promise to President Wilson that the new state created in 1918 from a large part of territory of Austrian Empire would be a model state fashioned after his vision. Unfortunately, the largesse of President Wilson resulted in the creation of a state with new minorities, this time German, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish. Over the years, the ethnic frictions increased. Eventually, Slovaks created a separate state in 1939, and at the same time Germans, Poles, and Hungarians annexed parts of Czechoslovakia to their respective, linguistically defined countries and Masaryk’s successor, President Benes, was forced to exile in Great Britain. Before his departure he loaded military planes with the gold of Russian Empire captured by Czech legions to transport it to London banks. Prior to Benes arrival to Great Britain, Churchill was working for Reader’s Digest, condensing books for their digested books editorial program. He was in dire financial straights, forcing him to put his Chattwick ancestral home for sale. Benes, using gold of the Russian Empire, started to pay Churchill a regular monthly stipend. Churchill withdrawed Chattwick manor from sale. Paying monthly stipends to a majority of influential British journalists, Benes with the help of Masaryk’s son were influential in formation of British pro-war party, leading to Churchill’s defeat of Chamberlain and playing a non-negligible role in England’s declaration of war on Germany, thus contributing to the outbreak of World War II in Europe. During the War, Benes, also organized foreign legions in England and Soviet Union. After the war, to achieve linguistic purity, the Benes government expelled the non-Slavic (German and Hungarian) citizens of Czechoslovakia, killing about 200,000 in the process (Hegert, 1979, p.12). In planning and preparation of this mass expulsion Dr. Benes was fully supported by President F. D. Roosevelt (Taborsky, 1981, pp. 125-126). Translated proportionately to the conditions of our society, this was equivalent to solving a problem of friction among ethnic groups by, e.g., forcibly moving all blacks to Africa. That our government could acquiesce to such an action is sad to contemplate.

After removing the ethnic frictions, new conflicts emerged, this time between the London and Moscow based factions of the post-war government of Czechoslovakia. Eventually, in 1948, the Moscow faction prevailed and began to persecute the London faction. On a personal level, this translated in a series of sudden reversals of fortune. President Masaryk died shortly before the onset of the Second World War not knowing, but perhaps guessing the possible consequences of his activities. However, his son was later murdered at Prague castle and his daughter recently died in a Chicago nursing home. Dr. Benes’ niece married Professor Brzezinski, a national security advisor in the Carter government. For other members of the London faction, the reversal of fortune was sudden. For example, the public prosecutor appointed by the London faction who sentenced to death the former German protector of Bohemia was himself sentenced to death, in absentia, by his successor appointed by the Moscow faction. After most of the prominent members of the London faction of the government re-emigrated, the conflict erupted between national and international inner circles of the Moscow faction. The national group discovered that the leading members of the international faction, at the beginning of the Cold War, opened Czechoslovak military airports to American bombers, stationed in West Germany which, after rearming, carried on bombing missions of Gaza strip. This served as a pretext for imprisonment and execution of the leading members of the Slansky’s international group of the Moscow faction of the government of Czechoslovakia. The rehabilitated members of the international group attempted a coup d’ etat in 1968, suppressed by armies of the Soviet Union and its allies. Following the 1989 revolution, after initial interregnum, the members of the London faction gained influence in the government and portrait of President Masaryk reappeared on banknotes of the Czech Republic. Slovakia established an independent republic and thus, after about 70 years, the story of Czechoslovakia came to an end.