Much has been made of a movement in California to put an end to so-called bilingual education.

For the most part, this movement has been viewed by some as an assault on pro-bilingual, Latino and Chicano educational politics.

In a city like Long Beach, bilingual is multilingual, with more than 70 languages spoken by limited English proficiency students in the public elementary school system.

It is absurd that a bilingual program could effectively meet the diverse needs of those students. And a bilingual program that focuses only on Spanish as a second language is ludicrous.

Culture begins at home. If a parent wants a child to learn Tagalog, Hindu, Spanish, Norwegian or Farsi to reinforce the child's sense of culture, fine: Many groups have Saturday or Sunday schools to meet that goal, and have had them for many years.

However, English language proficiency is the tool for success in the end-of-the-millennium world marketplace.

Even the language-protectionist French are having a hard time keeping English out of France, especially in hi-tech businesses and cyber-space.

Today's international language of business could have been Portuguese, Spanish, or French Ñ even Russian.

Through out history it was English that unified business, education and politics in a subcontinent of thousands of dialects.

California's bilingual education fiasco was brought about by two families in Orange County whose lawyers took the case to the Supreme Court.

The result was virtually unmanageable legislation that forced schools to receive federal funding for bilingual instruction.

One myth is that students come to the elementary classroom with second language fluency and literacy, and that this fluency is used as a foundation for English language instruction.

This is not always so and students move on to middle school fluent in neither the language of their parents nor English.

When it comes to language, we need to follow the same tack that environmentalists ask us to take with recycling: Think globally!