Ebonics: The Subject Still Stirs Strong Feelings

Rodney K Hopson hopson at duq.edu
Thu Jul 26 08:27:06 UTC 2007


And, wasn't Andrea's question related to the challenge of terminology
rather than the historical connection (not that one could necessarily
divorce the two)?  This sounds as much political as historical, no?

--
Rodney K. Hopson
Hillman Distinguished Professor
Department of Foundations and Leadership
School of Education
Duquesne University
600 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15282-0540
USA

+1 (412) 396 4034: voice
+1 (412) 396 1681: fax
hopson at duq.edu   : email

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Dennis Baron wrote:

> Right, Harold, but I was just talking about BE.  The French, as they
> say, were a whole nother thing.
>
> DB
>
> On Jul 25, 2007, at 7:49 PM, Harold Schiffman wrote:
>
> This goes back even further, I think; Bourdieu shows how when public
> education finally got going on a national scale in the 1880's, the
> goal of teachers became one of replacing patois (which was an
> inherently deficient linguistic system) with standard French, so
> that  the famous 'lucidity, clarity and logic" of the French language
> could then restructure the minds of young French persons.
>
> I quote from an article of mine on the subject:
>
> "Bourdieu and Whorf:  It is also interesting to note that Bourdieu
> specifically discerns a kind of folk-Whorfian (Mertz 1982) world-view
> at work in the imposition and functioning of this model. Teachers in
> French schools are on the front lines, as it were, working constantly
> to ``inculcate a clear faculty of expression and of each emotion,"
> i.e. through language. They work to replace the patois, which is
> nothing but a jumble of confusion, with standard French, itself the
> only ``clear and fixed" thing that deserves to be in their heads, and
> trying to get them to perceive and feel things in the same way. The
> work of the teacher is ``to erect the common conscience of the
> nation." Bourdieu calls this a Whorfian or Humboldtian theory of
> language, which sees scholarly action as ``intellectual and moral
> integration." (Bourdieu op cit.p.32.) Teaching language, therefore,
> is a kind of mind control;' instilling the standard language in the
> heads of children will reprogram them to think clearly."
>
> (From a paper entitled "French Language Policy: Centrism, Orwellian
> dirigisme, or Economic Determinism?" in a volume edited by Li Wei,
> Jean-Marc Dewaele, and Alex Housen, entitled Opportunities and
> Challenges of Bilingualism. published in Contributions to the
> Sociology of Language.(87) 2002, pp. 89-104. On-line at:
> http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540/handouts/french/dirigism/
> DIRIGISM.html
>
> On 7/25/07, Dennis Baron <debaron at uiuc.edu> wrote:
> This goes back -- in the linguistic literature -- at least to the
> 1960s with the work of Engelmann and Bereiter on the language of
> disadvantaged African-American children in preschool  (?headstart)
> programs in Urbana IL -- as I recall, that report claimed that these
> four year olds came to school with no language at all, and it was
> what Labov was reacting against in "The Logic of Nonstandard English"
> and his 1966 report on language in the inner city.
>
>
> Dennis
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 25, 2007, at 12:00 PM, Anthea Fraser Gupta wrote:
>
> On 7/25/07 12:19 PM, "Anthea Fraser Gupta" < A.F.Gupta at leeds.ac.uk>
> wrote:
>
> Can anyone explain why all this literature refers to 'language
> acquisition'
> and not to 'the learning of Standard English'? Using 'language
> acquisition
> makes it sound as if children are coming to school without any language!
>
> Ron wrote "And that's exactly what the dominant US folk ideology
> assumes about the
> language of African Americans."
> Exactly -- is anyone challenging the terminology?
>
> Anthea
>
> *     *     *     *     *
> Anthea Fraser Gupta (Dr)
> School of English, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT < www.leeds.ac.uk/
> english/staff/afg>
> NB: Reply to a.f.gupta at leeds.ac.uk
> *     *     *     *     *
>
>
>
>
> From: owner-lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu [ mailto:owner-lgpolicy-
> list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu] On Behalf Of Ronald Kephart
> Sent: 25 July 2007 17:22
> To: lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
> Subject: Re: Ebonics: The Subject Still Stirs Strong Feelings
>
>
>
> Ron
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> =+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
>
> Harold F. Schiffman
>
> Professor Emeritus of
> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
> Dept. of South Asia Studies
> University of Pennsylvania
> Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
>
> Phone:  (215) 898-7475
> Fax:  (215) 573-2138
>
> Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
> http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/
>
> -------------------------------------------------
>
>



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