DIALECTS 227
We have an obligation to be sensitive to the situation that our students find
themselves in. At the same time, it is important to recognize that positions like
the NCTE resolution oversimplify a complex problem. As teachers, we have an
even greater obligation to provide students with the tools they need to realize
their full potential, which they must do within the framework of sociolinguistic
realities. It may be entirely wrong and unfair, but people nevertheless view cer-
tain dialects negatively. Wolfram, Adger, and Christian, (1998) reported that
these negative views are held even by those who speak nonstandard dialects.
Some people may argue that it’s a mistake to put so much emphasis on the
socioeconomic value of helping students master Standard and formal Stan-
dard English. Doing so serves to commodify education, making it a means
to a dubious end. There is truth in this argument. However, we must be care-
ful not to press this argument too forcefully—the value of economic secu-
rity and social mobility cannot realistically be denied, especially for
students from poor families. The ease with which even the best and the
brightest fall into ideologically induced incoherence on this point is stun-
ning. We need only look at professional publications over the last two de-
cades to see it everywhere. Some years ago, for example, Anthony Petrosky
(1990) criticized schools in the Mississippi Delta because they were too
successful at graduating students who went on to college and made success-
ful careers for themselves in other states. Petrosky complained that learning
Standard English, or what he called “instructional language,” maintained
the “existing class and socioeconomic order by allowing the students who
do well the opportunity to leave the Delta ...; this opportunity can be said to
reinforce the values necessary to maintain the authority, the priorities, and
the language that allow those values to exist in the first place” (p. 66). In
other words, if the schools had not provided instruction in Standard English,
the students who left the Delta would not have had the opportunity to do so,
and they would not have had the opportunity to pursue careers in medicine,
teaching, engineering, law, and so on. Instead, like their less capable, less
diligent cohorts who did not master the Standard dialect, they would have
been forced by circumstance to remain in the Delta, where unemployment
hovered around 20% and the number of people living below the national
poverty level was as high as 68% in 1994 (U.S. Department of Commerce,
Bureau of the Census, County & City Data Book, pp. 2–3). Such arguments
seem to confuse dignity and value. Without question, there can be dignity in
poverty, butvalue?It is relatively easy for those who do not have to deal
with closed socioeconomic doors to engage in this sort of political postur-
ing. In the name of ideology, they are always too ready to sacrifice the
dreams others have for a better life.