The current foreign language teaching landscape now is dominated by the creation of bilingualism through schooling.

The increasingly growing number of so-called national-plus schools (often purportedly using an international curriculum) is telling evidence the marketization of bilingual schools is enjoying a heyday.

The luring selling point of the program is that proficiency in using English can be gradually developed in a setting where school subjects are taught in English and where English is used as a means of interaction among teachers and peers.

In this particular setting, "the English only policy" is often strictly implemented with the hope that class teachers can successfully take their students to the "Promised Land", where fluency in English becomes the ultimate aim.

Despite the exposure to use English in this artificial setting, there seems to be no convincing evidence to claim that nationally bilingual education works effectively.

Claims over the advantages of bilingual schooling only offer anecdotal rather than empirical evidence. And they are always notoriously part of marketing campaigns to cajole people, especially the well-off, to send their offspring to join the school.

Without compelling evidence of its effectiveness, one can suspect bilingual schooling is open to gross failure.

This suspicion however is often not without its raison d'jtre. For one thing, bilingualism is often narrowly, if not mistakenly, conceived as classroom practice in schools only.

This simplistic conception provides an inadequate understanding of what bilingual education really entails and what their ultimate objectives are.

Running a bilingual program without a clear theoretical foundation would be a shaky enterprise.

Bilingual education is associated merely with an educational issue, ignoring the complexity of the contextual variables that are inextricably bound to it.

So to lay claim the use of two or more languages in the school context may automatically leads to proficient language learners with more effective outcomes is certainly rather inflating.

In reality, language used in the artificial classroom setting is only part of a wider means of communication that interacts in complex ways to make schooling more or less effective.

In addition, the language learned in school usually belongs to a formal register -- a register not necessarily amicable to language used for interaction outside school.

It then follows that formal education does not necessarily prepare students to be able to use the language in a completely different register.

As learners are exposed to formal English in a highly artificial setting, bilingual education often produces ephemeral results.

English may be effectively learned in schools and servile learners will certainly be ready to respond to English. Yet, when they are outside the school, they may switch into their native language to their peers, teachers and parents.

It is obvious then for bilingual education to produce fruitful results, a pedagogic perspective is quintessential, but insufficient.

There is a need here to get a full grasp of bilingual education by contextualizing it within the domains of politics.

The existence of bilingual education is hardly separated from politics as bilingual education entails political assumptions and ideologies which are related to such issues as the learners' national identity, language dominance, the status of learners' native language, public opinion and social order.

Clearly, these points should be taken seriously as they serve as basic concepts underpinning the practice of bilingual education.

The politicization of bilingual education can lead to multi-disciplinary perspectives, which surely extend and enrich the scope of bilingualism from the sole pedagogy to sociolinguistics, psychology, history and national language planning.

As the differing views offered by these perspectives can beneficially affect the growth of bilingual education, the incorporation of these views is more likely to yield robust results.

Only then can bilingual education be fully understood and eventually carried out effectively. And only then can we realize the intricacy and arduousness of our noble task to lead our learners to the "Promised Land".

The writer is chief-editor of Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching. He can be reached at setiono.sugiharto@atmajaya.ac.id.

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