According to Nunes, "Symbolic systems do not merely express the reasoning we carry out in some other fashion; they are an essential part of the reasoning process" (1995, p. 95). Symbolic systems, including language, are culturally derived; Nunes's focus is on mathematical problem-solving abilities in classroom and "street" contexts, including observation that some who perform badly in the classroom perform competently on the street. This appears to suggest that symbolic systems are an attribute of cultural norms, which determine how concepts are formulated. But Nunes says elsewhere that symbolic tools that people use "must not be confounded with the powers and limits of the users themselves" (p. 98). This appears to suggest that symbolic systems (whether arithmetic competence or language use) are an attribute of rational capacity. It is in that context that Chomsky's discussion of language acquisition by children takes on meaning. His view is that children can (even though they do not always) discover good linguistic form without ever having learned grammatical rules in a formal way. Language itself develops from impulse toward making a formal expression that was already resident in the child. The rational/cognitive component is d

First there is the fact that not all non-English speakers are going to be speaking the same language; it seems impractical, illogical, and undesirable to require the first-grade teacher to have proficiency in English, Spanish, Tagalog, Cantonese, and Russian just because students speaking those languages wind up in the same classroom and more, just because they cannot speak English. To put it another way, the educational system cannot accommodate all polyglots; to attempt to do so would potentially put sundry minority populations in the position of competing against one another for accommodation by the English-speaking mainstream. One does not have to be an advocate of English-only education to see that this would have detrimental consequences for the organization of the system. And it seems pernicious for individual student development as well if, as cognitive theory appears to suggest, children have capacity to conquer whatever difficulties the English language places before them and thereby empower themselves vis-a-vis the mainstream--whatever language and whatever culture they start out with. Another issue is long-term practical consequences to students of failing to master standard English usa