The teachers themselves are capable of seeing this circular logic: “Since
English teachers have been in large part responsible for the narrow
attitudes of today’s employers, changing attitudes toward dialect
variations does not seem an unreasonable goal, for today’s students will be
tomorrow’s employers” (The National Council of Teachers of English
1974), but actual attempts to resolve this conflict are harder to find.
Are there no examples of educators with more informed and enlightened
approaches to diversity in language? Teachers who strive to teach children
to read and write, and at the same time respect the wholeness of the home
language and the social identity attached to it? Are there teachers who
question underlying assumptions?
Of course there are. At a college in the Midwest, there is at least one
single English teacher who does not find it necessary to eradicate one
variety of English to teach reading and writing in another. The Chicago
Tribune found this method so remarkable that they ran an article on the
approach, and highlighted a classroom practice of “[not] scold[ing] Black
students ... when they said ‘ax,’ rather than ‘ask’” (Warren 1993: 2). In
New Mexico, the Hopi Nation oversees the training and evaluation of
bilingual teachers who come from the community and teach in the
community, so that the experiences of Luther Standing Bear do not have to
be repeated. A Sioux enrolled in an English-Only boarding school, he
wrote, “How hard it was to forego the consolation of speech” (Standing
Bear 1928, as cited in Reyhner and Eder 2006).
These stories of teachers and administrators who resist the process of
language subordination are rare. What our schools do, for the most part, is
to insist that some children forego the expressive power and consolation of
speech which is the currency of their home communities. This gesture of
denial and symbolic subordination is projected as a first and necessary
step to becoming a good student and a good citizen.
Discussion Questions and Exercises
Write your own linguistic history. Where did your influences
come from? What ideologies were you exposed to? Which