At least here in the Estados Unidos, Diversity is one of the biggest Frauds I've come across. In every culture there is are people that have been unfairly left out of the mainstream and there's no doubt that there's a benefit helping ensure that everyone is fairly represented.

But Diversity here is a joke because it's precisely the opposite. I mean, take a Black guy, a Jewish Woman, a Hispanic Female and a Caucasian male. Say the first is from New York, the Second from Baltimor, the third from Miami and the forth from Seattle. Say the first one went to Harvard, the second to Yale, the third to Columbia and the forth to Stanford. On the surface, this is a diverse crowd. However it's not hard to imagine that they might all have pretty non-diverse viewpoints about certain issues.

SO IF they all think the same, how is their diversity a benefit? Colleges are the ultimate champions of 'diversity'. However they are pretty homogenous in say Political viewpoints. I could give you $1,000.00 for every Pro-lifer that works in a Woman's Studies program and I wouldn't be down a cent. I'm not advocating Pro-life or anything like that, but clearly you'll find a very monolithic mindset among many of in the 'diversity' crowd.

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As far as multilingual education goes... I learned Spanish and English both at a very young age and it has helped me more than I can imagine. I think kids should learn as much as they can - about Math, Science and Languages. But diversity for its own sake is silly. Look at how many Oriental's, Arabs and Indians are in the United States and excel in Math while so many people here are terrible at it. Many of them not only learned another langauge, but a language that doesn't look anything like there's. It's a lot easier to pick up Spanish if you already speak english than it is to pick up Japanese.

I think when it comes to diversity you need to look to results. Does it achieve what it's supposed to? Are the kids in those villages coming out ahead? If not, it's not a hard case to make that they are being held back, intentionally or unintentionally.

It's the same here in the states.... All of the folks that 'care' about minority education wouldn't be caught dead sending their kids to one of the schools that they themselves shove down the throats of the people that they puprort to help. How many politician's kids down there send there kids to the same schools as the indigenous people in the villages? And how many demand the same cirriculum for their own kids? If the answer is "not many" or less, the truth pretty much speaks for itself.

About the "diversity" -- great comments. I'm sick of superficial crap too... or perhaps you and are I underestimating the value of ensuring that each team has at least one hermaphrodite in it?

I'm all for multilingual education. I think it's embarrassing that people don't know at least two languages. I hope to learn a few more myself :). However, force-feeding an unused language with no decent written form (the Mayans don't even know how to write their own language -- they had to have many Europeans and a Russian guy figure it out for them) over a useful language with millions of speakers is nonsense. Seriously, there are more speakers of Klingon than some of the Mayan dialects. If you want to learn a language like that to enrich yourself, go ahead. Just don't pretend it's actually going to help out the country.

I am from Galicia, an autonomous region in the northwest of Spain. I must say here that Spain is the second most de-centralised country in the world after Canada. The first (and official) language in Galicia is Galician, although for practical purposes everybody is completely fluent in Spanish and, in fact, Spanish is a co-official language. Kids at school learn Spanish and Galician. In addition, they learn a "foreign" language such as English. This means that most young people in Galicia speak (a) Galician for historical and cultural reasons, (b) Spanish for practical reasons and (c) English for communicating with the rest of the world. Other autonomous regions of Spain (Catalonia, the Basque Country) have very similar situations.
I think that is a very nice model and combines cultural diversity with a pragmatic and realistic approach.
CesarGon.

Then on the other hand there are the villages where spanish is being pushed too much, and the kids are punished for speaking mayan. but as there is nobody there teaching them proper spanish they end up not realy speaking anything. They should be teaching them both, which also helps with learning to read and write, if they learn to read in their native language its much easyer for them to learn to read in another, and if they can actualy speak their native language compleatly its easyer for them to grasp the concepts of proper speach.