thomas malloy wrote:
You're right, teaching any children in eubonics is tantamount to child abuse.
So is teaching children that their mother tongue is disreputable or substandard. In the early 20th century, this practice was taken to such an extreme with American Indian children, not only was it abuse, it was criminal abuse.
Furthermore, it is the teacher's responsibility to learn to understand his student's native dialect, whether it be Scots brogue, Caribbean English, a black dialect, or the ancient and wonderful Appalachian dialects (which have long been denigrated as "hillbilly" language.)
Given economic and cultural realities, it is probably best to teach all U.S. children to speak a standard U.S. television-style middle-class dialect, and to educate them in it. This is a shame because it will eventually lead to the demise of minority and regional dialects, despite all they have contributed to our language and art. I hate to think of a world in which only scholars will be able to understand Mark Twain's dialog, but that is where we are headed. It is more important to advance the lives of individual children than to preserve their culture as a whole. A friend of mine lives in a bucolic Japanese backwoods village which is rapidly modernizing and being paved over. This is a tragic loss for Japan and the world at large, but as he says, it is good for local people, and no one wants to live in a museum.
The black American Academic Robert Sowell . . . contents that the northerners spoke English correctly.
He is not a scholar if he thinks any dialect is "correct" or "incorrect." No respectable scholar of language in the last 150 years would spout such backwards, ethnocentric, odious, baseless nonsense. That's like saying that ants are more "correct" than wasps because they evolved later, or British English is superior to the older American form. Newer is better?
- Jed
