[EDLING:1389] [Fwd: culture in the news]

[Tamara Warhol]

This message came through the CAE Listserv. Although it does not 
specifically address language, I was interested to see that many of the 
socialization issues raised mirror those proposed my Shirley Brice 
Heath, Susan Philips, etc. in the early 1980s.

I noticed this is the second most emailed article in the NY Times over the 
past week (from Sunday's paper) -- a discussion of "culture" and the school 
performance of Black males:

Orlando Patterson:  A Poverty of the Mind:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/26/opinion/26patterson.html?incamp=article_popular

It begins:

"SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the 
tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. 
But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to 
adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any 
effective strategy to deal with it.

The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed 
in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960's: the rejection of 
any explanation that invokes a group's cultural attributes — its distinctive 
attitudes, values and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its 
members — and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like 
low incomes, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing."



At the bottom of the page the Tmes gives links to some blogs where the story's 
been picked up -- some of these are interesting too.