Raspberry column

[Timothy Mason]

On Sunday, Aug 31, 2003, at 19:09 Europe/Paris, Ronald Kephart wrote:

> I encountered this column by William Raspberry in the Florida
> Time-Union this morning; apparently it appeared in the Washington Post
> a few days ago (we're always behind in Florida).
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40302-2003Aug24.html
>
> The column reports on a book, *Meaningful Differences in the Everyday
> Experience of Young American Children*, by Hart and Risley, published
> in 1995. The principle findings, as reported by Raspberry, are:
>
> * Verbal stimulation (roughly the number of words a young child hears
> at home) may be the most important predictor of the child's future
> academic, economic and social success.
>
This chimes in with what other researchers have found. Children whose
mothers talk to them a lot acquire larger vocabularies and more complex
and flexible grammatical patterns than do those whose mothers do not.
Similar differences crop up when you compare the children of
non-depressed mothers with those of depressed mothers. Depressed mother
interact less with their children, provide them with less language
intake, and this results in poorer language skills. (Other cognitive
skills also suffer).

> * The difference in the amount of verbal stimulation received by
> children of poor families and those of the middle class is so huge as
> to be essentially unbridgeable.
This appears to be the journalist's conclusion rather than that of the
researchers. He simply concludes that the kind of programme that would
'bridge' the gap is unlikely to be implemented. This is a political
judgement

>
> It seems that these differences are being invoked as a main factor in
> the poor school performance of children from lower class and working
> class homes. My initial gut-level reaction (without having read the
> book) is one of cynicism: that this *sounds like* another round of
> blaming the victims for being part of a system that is not prepared to
> deal with the (normal?) diversity that one expects in a society of
> this size. But I wonder what others might have to say about this, if
> anything?

It certainly seems unrealistic to expect schooling to effect any great
change in the pathways of socialization ; on the other hand, the fact
that psychological factors, such as depression, can harm children's
development, and that many parents in working class and minority homes
are subjected to pressures that are likely to adversely affect their
mental well-being suggests that the best and most efficient programme
to close the cognitive gap would be a radical raising of incomes and a
lowering of the number of hours spent at work, coupled with the putting
in place of a system of social security that would enable parents to
concentrate on their children's cognitive well-being rather than simply
hoping to survive.

Best wishes

Timothy Mason
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 3836 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20030831/4b74c74f/attachment.bin>