Since moving back home to Hawaii I have become particularly interested in Hawaiian language schools and bilingual education in general.. A couple weeks ago I watched the Kamehameha Schools Annual Song Contest and was blown away by the level of linguistic and cultural knowledge that these students displayed. Check it out below if you're interested.
I think the teaching of native cultures and languages is something that is very important and I would like to see more of an effort to maintain this heritage. While the Hawaiian language is an official language of the state of Hawaii, most residents of Hawaii, even Native Hawaiians, do not speak Olelo Hawaii (Hawaiian Language). The one exception is the island of Ni'ihau where Hawaiian is the primary spoken language and is the formal language of education. To me, the issue of teaching the Hawaiian language in schools is a bit of a different situation from typical bilingual education which usually focuses on using a student's mother tongue to help them learn the common tongue, so it's hard to find a lot of comparison. However, educational organizations such as the NEA generally seem favor bilingual education because of research that suggest that bilingualism improves an individual's cognitive ability. The NEA featured an article on their website which explains that due to the code switching ability that people who speak more than one language often use, bilingual or multilingual individuals tend to exercise better "executive control" because they have better focus and selective attention which allows them ignore "salient distractors."
I would like to point out that though it is not the common tongue, there are a total of 18 public and charter schools throughout the state of Hawaii that offer a Hawaiian language immersion program where students attend classes taught in strictly in Hawaiian. The programs do exist but I would like to see them integrated into general public schools by offering Hawaiian as a
