This book provides an overview of bilingualism and bilingual education by examining historical and recent literature, presenting firsthand observations, and demonstrating how both popular views and scholarly research actually mirror larger social issues. Following the first chapter, a brief introduction, chapter 2 reviews the historical controversy over the intelligence of bilingual individuals and discusses how the interpretation of facts regarding bilingualism is tempered to a large degree by current social theories. Different disciplinary perspectives on bilingualism among young children are reviewed in chapter 3, which also charts a shift in scholarly focus from an interest in the description of language behaviors toward the postulation of complex structures in the mind. Chapter 4 examines various ways in which the qualities of the bilingual mind have been characterized, while chapter 5 provides a linguistic view of how children learn a second language and considers implications