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textualdevianceBut forcing me to learn how to speak properly is KILLING MY CULTURE, MAN.
I fucking hate that. It usually comes from the same people who like to pretend that being a violent, misogynistic gangbanger is some sort of legitimate subculture.
For the record, I support bilingual education for immigrants. There's no sense in shortchanging a child's learning in other fields just to bang English into their heads. It's entirely possible to teach someone to speak English at the same time they're learning math and science in Spanish, Russian, Tagalog or whatever. And whatever someone wants to speak at home is fine with me. I also don't have a problem with immigrants or tourists speaking in their native language in public. No one is entitled to eavesdrop on someone else's conversation.
However, those things are not the same as someone who deliberately misuses English when their family has been in an English-speaking country for six generations. Accents? Regional or subcultural colloquialisms? Whatever. But bad grammar and spelling ARE NOT A CULTURAL THING. They are a symptom of several problems: poverty, poor education or a cultural lack of respect for education.
I understand that the school system is part of a larger "The Man" morass that a lot of oppressed subcultures fear and mistrust, but it's not going to do them any good to encourage that fear and mistrust. Legitimizing crappy language skills by slapping a Culturally Protected label on them is only fucking over people who really don't need to be fucked over any further.
This isn't about assimilation--there are plenty of legitimate cultural and subcultural distinctions. Improper use of the language is not one of them.
Ugh. This sort of cultural relativism is why I could never go into anthropology. And why I'm working my ass off to correct the problem of "all opinions are equal" in the media. Education, empiricism and expertise have to count for something, or we are well and truly fucked as a species.
I fucking hate that. It usually comes from the same people who like to pretend that being a violent, misogynistic gangbanger is some sort of legitimate subculture.
For the record, I support bilingual education for immigrants. There's no sense in shortchanging a child's learning in other fields just to bang English into their heads. It's entirely possible to teach someone to speak English at the same time they're learning math and science in Spanish, Russian, Tagalog or whatever. And whatever someone wants to speak at home is fine with me. I also don't have a problem with immigrants or tourists speaking in their native language in public. No one is entitled to eavesdrop on someone else's conversation.
However, those things are not the same as someone who deliberately misuses English when their family has been in an English-speaking country for six generations. Accents? Regional or subcultural colloquialisms? Whatever. But bad grammar and spelling ARE NOT A CULTURAL THING. They are a symptom of several problems: poverty, poor education or a cultural lack of respect for education.
I understand that the school system is part of a larger "The Man" morass that a lot of oppressed subcultures fear and mistrust, but it's not going to do them any good to encourage that fear and mistrust. Legitimizing crappy language skills by slapping a Culturally Protected label on them is only fucking over people who really don't need to be fucked over any further.
This isn't about assimilation--there are plenty of legitimate cultural and subcultural distinctions. Improper use of the language is not one of them.
Ugh. This sort of cultural relativism is why I could never go into anthropology. And why I'm working my ass off to correct the problem of "all opinions are equal" in the media. Education, empiricism and expertise have to count for something, or we are well and truly fucked as a species.
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no subject
What I argue is that reinforcing the grammatical components of it in children limits their ability to learn correct grammar in Standard English--thereby limiting their ability to earn a good living.
I've been a voracious reader and writer since I was a small fry, but even now I still have trouble with certain grammar and punctuation quirks. I didn't understand the that/which thing until my newswriting class last fall. Yet I even had the benefit of being encouraged to learn
I can't imagine what a poor child in a community that doesn't value education (which is unfortunately true for a lot of poor and oppressed people who see public schools as a representation of an oppressive force) might have to go through to get the basics of Standard English down when she's getting a completely different picture of the language reinforced by her culture.
Poor white kids have some of the same problem in that the version of English spoken at home isn't usually the version they're learning in school, but if the school is doing its job, it works on, well, beating the bad grammar out of their heads.
What reinforcing AAVE is doing, then, is equivalent to a teacher of a white kid saying, "oh, you speak rural Southwest English. Go ahead and keep speaking that, but try to remember these 2,000 different rules about Standard English, too."
Even if a handful of kids--usually middle class ones, or ones with educational support--can manage to speak both fluently, there are still many, many more whose literacy will be damaged by not reinforcing the common language of commerce.
Communication and literacy are so intensely critical to solving poverty that I just can't imagine why anyone would think preserving a dialect is more important than educating at-risk kids.