Texas, which after World War I opposed the teaching of all foreign languages in grade schools, may soon be as bilingual as New Mexico. Last week almost 13,000 Corpus Christi students from the third grade and up were learning to use Spanish as readily as English.

In a state which shares a 1,200-mile border with Mexico, 160,000 Mexican-born residents, and an uncounted number of U.S. citizens of Mexican and Spanish blood Spanish would seem to be a necessity, but in 1940, Corpus Christi had to disregard the state law even to make Spanish a grade-school subject. A year later, the state legalized this action. Two years later, 1,125 Texas school districts were teaching Spanish to some 250,000 children.

Passionate protagonist of Texan bilingualism is Mexican-born, Texas-trained Edmundo E. Mireles, who runs Corpus Christi's grade-school Spanish education program. Linguist Mireles (he knows seven languages) spends his days teaching Spanish, his nights brushing up the high-school Spanish of other teachers who strive to keep one Spanish jump ahead of their pupils. Because Mireles says it is unnecessary to know much Spanish to teach a little, some pedagogues eye him askance. But he argues from results.

Mireles claims that the chief obstacle to learning a foreign language is the idea that Americans can never learn to speak them fluently. He says that this certainly is not true of Spanish. Mireles insists that language classes must not be tedious. Conversation is the main thing. Texas teachers start off by making the sounds of Spanish vowels. On the second day of school third graders greet each other in Spanish. Children talk about their ages, games, homes. Gradually their vocabularies expand. Pupils learn how words and phrases should sound, not abstract rules. Formal grammar comes in high school. The same ideas are embodied in Mireles' textbooks (Mi Libra Espanol, I, II and III), the latest of which is just off the press.

Mild-mannered Teacher Mireles, a determined amalgam of Latin and American, symbolically keeps two books on his desk: Shakespeare and Cervantes. He believes that in time his bilingual children will lead their adults a long way toward inter-American understanding. In Corpus Christi more than 600 adults have enrolled in night Spanish classes in order to keep up with their children.

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