Raspberry column and "verbal skills"

[Timothy Mason]

At 8:03 -0500 2/9/03, Laura Miller wrote:
>Ron and Karl have asked us to consider something critical about this 
>issue. If someone has the linguistic background that enables them to 
>get into college, like Karl's friend, yet they are still  not 
>considered "academic" material, isn't it exactly middle-class social 
>and cultural knowledge they are thought to lack? Many working-class 
>people are incredibly "verbally skilled," much more so than some of 
>the shy and halting scholars or windbag academics I hang out with.

>I can point to the case of a women with only a 9th grade education, 
>who had an enormous vocabulary and used it extensively with her five 
>children, yet all but one eventually dropped out of high school. It 
>wasn't because they "lacked verbal skills." (The one that stayed in 
>school eventually became an anthropologist).


Verbal skills are not the only factors that determine school success. 
But when one looks closely at those who leave school with no 
qualifications whatsoever, and whose failures can be traced back to 
the first few years of schooling, then language skills are the 
primary factor. See, for example, Bernard Lahire's 'Culture écrite et 
inégalités scolaires' (Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1993).

>The manner in which class-based knowledge and norms are deflected 
>onto language is known to us, so why are we so eager to believe the 
>validity or usefulness of this study? For one thing, how does one 
>really "count" utterances?
>Laura


Well, look at the study itself and you'll see. Why do you so easily 
doubt the probity and scientificity of work carried out by seasoned 
researchers, the results of which concord with those of other 
seasoned researchers - see for example Huttenlocher? The fact that 
you know people who do not *fit the model* is no refutation in itself 
; we have known for decades that there are working class children who 
succeed at school and middle class children who do not. We can even 
offer explanations of why this is so ; D.H. Lawrence, for example, 
followed a classic path, similar to many of those that Marsden and 
Jackson interviewed in their classic study 'Education and the Working 
Class' (Penguin 1970). You may prefer to think that sociology and 
educational sociology are nonsense, of course. In which case I 
suppose I could conclude the same thing of Linguistic anthropology, 
some of the practicants of which, going by the evidence here on 
offer, prefer anecdotal evidence and gut-feeling to careful research. 
(By the way, where do you meet all these inarticulate professors? I 
must say that the majority of French academics with whom I have 
conversed seem to handle language pretty well. Perhaps American 
academia is a case apart).

What is wrong with the article is not the conclusions that the study 
itself come to, but the political use that the journalist makes of 
it. One way of overcoming the academic failure of children from homes 
in which parents are under such pressures as to leave them with 
little time or will to interact fully with their children - and where 
the children pick up their culture from the television (Lahire 
analyses what happens to their ability to construct coherent stories, 
and how this affects their schooling - and in particular their 
ability to write self-standing texts) - is to change the life 
conditions of those parents in such a way as to leave them time and 
freedom from stress.

Not that I imagine that this would overcome the bias in school 
systems against children from the working classes or ethnic 
minorities in and of itself.

Best wishes

Timothy Mason