Ebonics: The Subject Still Stirs Strong Feelings

[Rodney K Hopson]

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/
>
> -------------------------------------------------
>
>