Raspberry column and "verbal skills"

[peterson]

I'm not big on quantitative studies, but the study seems sound as far as it 
goes.  Nor should it surprise us.  Every time I teach anthropological 
linguistics I drag out Shirley Brice Heath's old article on bedtime stories, 
which shows that not only vocabulary but all manner of verbal experiences in 
the home affect the ways people of different classes meet school expectations.
 That there are exceptions is no surprise either.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Pierre Bourdieu, as this report, and the 
interpretation made of it by the journalist, fit neatly into his critique of 
the educational system.  Bourdieu essentially argues that schools do not so 
much educate as reward and reinforce particular (middle class) practices 
students bring with them from their family origins, negatively sanctioning 
alternative practices.  Language practices are paramount among these.  Schools 
thus operate not so much as tools for class mobility (as our popular 
mythologies would have it) but as mechanisms for class reproduction.  
Exceptions are to be expected in Bourdieu's formulation: there will always be 
those of lower classes who, because of their "unique life trajectory" can use 
the system to advantage (I had a secretary once in DC who yanked her daughter 
from the public school system, quit her job, and lived on welfare for a year 
while she homeschooled her daughter.    Her daughter was subsequently able to 
get into a magnet school because her test scores went up dramatically).  The 
same thing can happen in reverse.  But such exceptions are unlikely to ever 
occur in statistically significant degrees.

The question Bourdieu raises from this analysis is different than that of the 
reporter in this case.  Bourdieu asks if there are alternative modes of 
education that can be truly democratic, that is, that do not privilege or that 
have mechanisms for raising the underprivileged.  His answer seems to be that 
society doesn't really want schools that level class distinctions.

Mark

Mark Allen Peterson
Asst Prof of Anthropology and International Studies
152 Upham Hall
Miami University
Oxford, OH  45056
tel: 513 529-5018
fax: 513 529-8396
e-mail: petersm2 at muohio.edu

>===== Original Message From Timothy Mason <tmason at club-internet.fr> =====
>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