Ana Torres still has nightmares about the year she immigrated to Vancouver from Guatemala, when she was 10. To train her Spanish ears in English, her parents bought her a bright-orange Texas Instruments Speak&Spell machine. It helped, but the real learning and the deep shock came when she was tossed into an English-only classroom at Vancouver's Saint Joseph's elementary school. She describes that first year's alienation and confusion as the toughest challenge she's ever encountered.

But she has no regrets.

“I didn't go to ESL and I really think I'm better for it,” Torres told the Georgia Straight. “It made me learn English fast. I find some of my peers [who attended ESL classes full-time] never seemed to get as good a grasp on the language as I did.”

By the time she was halfway through high school, Torres's language skills were sharp enough to propel her into an International Baccalaureate program, and on through to a master's degree in English from SFU.

Torres's success story is statistically unusual. With UBC professor Lee Gunderson's alarming 2006 research indicating that 65 percent of Vancouver's ESL students disappear from academic courses between grades 8 and 12, and the BC Teachers' Federation's A “Crisis in ESL Education” in BC Schools report, it appears this province's attempt to integrate many of its 60,676 ESL students is a failure.

But that's precisely what UBC's Henry Yu thinks it should be. Like Torres, the associate history professor who specializes in multiculturalism thinks students learn English automatically. Currently, many ESL students must complete a non-credit “sheltered” language class before joining academic classrooms, essentially isolating them from social English. The challenge in Lower Mainland schools, Yu told the Straight, is to keep culturally and linguistically rich teens from losing their human capital.

“Now, you're rewarded for being monolingual, and punished for being multilingual,” Yu said. “The reality is, less than half my UBC students were born in Canada, and many of them struggle to get top grades. But as soon as they graduate, guess who's going to get hired first? Who is more useful? Those born outside Canada.”

Yu chastised Vancouver for thinking of itself as a gateway to the Pacific with a 30-percent Chinese population, yet providing fewer Mandarin immersion classes than are available in Calgary. Pacific Canada, he said, has always been diverse; it's time we asked who should be integrating with whom.

The main home language of 40 percent of Vancouver public-school students is English, according to a 2005 chart published by the Vancouver school board. Following closely are Chinese (either Cantonese or Mandarin) at 33 percent, then Vietnamese and Punjabi, at five percent each.

In this context, the Lower Mainland's schools should dwell less on the supposed crisis in ESL, Yu said, and more on the crisis in global education. The era of “white supremacy” (a term Yu used repeatedly) in curricula should end, he argued. Every high school, he said, should have multiple language programs, immersion programs, and overseas exchanges.

“I don't think multiculturalism in schools, as it is defined now, is useful,” he said. “We have consumption multiculturalism. As long as once a year we get to all dance around in our funny outfits and try different food, that's fine. But the message is, the rest of the year, they better conform.”

Yu pointed out that outright racism is rare now. Instead, those in control of education systems simply refuse to revise their programs and perspective to align with the global reality.

In Torres's case, it is thanks to her family, not the schools, that she still speaks fluent Spanish, as well as English. At home, her mother enforced a rule that all five children had to speak only Spanish. For her, it was an ideal situation. But she's also aware that it won't work for students whose mother tongues are more common in the schools.

“If I'd had another option, anyone I could have spoke Spanish with at school, I would have, instead of learning English,” she said.-