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ARTICLE

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Counter-Argument

Jeff Zorn

Published online: 6 July 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

Dedication

I learned to teach English at a Historically Black College in Alabama

under the guidance of no-nonsense African American women. Studying

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” a resolution affirming the

legitimacy of dialect from the National Council of Teachers of English

(NCTE), when it first appeared in the early 1970s, my mentors saw

beneficent intent but blatant shortcoming. Betty Gates, my most inspirational

colleague, said, and I am quoting exactly, “With friends like these, black

children hardly need enemies.”

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language” remains the official position

statement of the guild of college compositionists on dialect difference,

lionized to this day as a first principle of “liberatory” English teaching. My

mentors would be sorely disappointed to learn this. It is in respectful memory

of these excellent English teachers—Betty Gates and Emma Cleveland in

particular—that I offer my counter-argument.

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: The Beginnings

The sound, kind impulse behind “Students’ Right to Their Own

Language” (SRTOL) was to support the aspirations of poor, nonwhite, and

Acad. Quest. (2010) 23:311–326 DOI 10.1007/s12129-010-9175-x

Jeff Zorn is professor of English at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA 95053; [email protected].

culturally marginalized students. The document itself, however, offered

underachievement and provincialism to the students it purported to serve.

Even its advocates concede that SRTOL reads as committee prose with the

different hands not smoothly blended, but no one has said firmly enough, or

demonstrated patiently enough, how little sense SRTOL makes.1

In 1973 the Conference on College Composition and Communication of

the National Council of Teachers of English approved the SRTOL resolution.

A special edition of College Composition and Communication then printed

that resolution for general distribution, prefaced it with a rationale, and

appended fifteen sections of commentary. Even a cursory glance at the

resolution itself makes plain why a full booklet was needed to begin

explaining it to fellow professionals:

We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of

language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which

they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago

denied that the myth of a standard American dialect had any validity.

The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt

of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim

leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for

humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and

racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly

that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable

them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their

own language.2

Recently two books and at least five major articles have lauded SRTOL as

a classic guide for the current generation of English compositionists, a first

1Theater critic John Simon had many keen insights into what was wrong with SRTOL. For Simon’s scathing critique, see “Playing Tennis Without a Net,” chapter 6 of Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline (New York: C.N. Potter, 1976). 2Conference on College Composition and Communication, Students’ Right to Their Own Language, a special edition of College Composition and Communication 25 (Fall 1974), text available at http://www. ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Groups/CCCC/NewSRTOL.pdf. All references within the text refer to this version of SRTOL.

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principle of enlightened professional praxis.3 As one of its drafters and long-

term defenders has stated, SRTOL “moved the intellectual production of

knowledge in the field to a whole nother [sic] level.”4 The turn away from

coaching all students in Formal Standard English toward “counter-hegemonic

literacy training,” i.e., reshaping writing classes into political conversion

seminars, “was the next logical step after the Students’ Right campaign.”5

The stakes are high, then, in toppling SRTOL off the pedestal it has held for

decades.

My critique develops six points, all with wide-ranging importance for

English education, and more generally for U.S. education, today. STROL

(1) never begins to examine a “right” to one’s own language; (2) offers

no consistent view on the importance of dialect; (3) wildly overrates its

“sophisticated” knowledge in sociology and linguistics; (4) both draws on

and feeds into a reactionary politics of ethnic-cultural chauvinism; (5)

clumps people into homogeneous, internally undifferentiated groups,

missing individuals (in particular, individual student-writers) entirely; and

(6) tries to shame English teachers for professional work of which we

should be proud.

All told, I will show that SRTOL is a shameful piece of work whose

ongoing endorsement warps and stains language education in the United

States.

3See Valerie Felita Kinloch, “Revisiting the Promise of Students’ Right to Their Own Language: Pedagogical Strategies,” College Composition and Communication 57, no. 1 (September 2005): 83–113; Stephen Parks, Class Politics: The Movement for Students’ Right to Their Own Language (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000); Patrick Bruch and Richard Marback, “Critical Hope, ‘Students’ Right,’ and the Work of Composition Studies,” in Patrick Bruch and Richard Marbeck, eds., The Hope and the Legacy: The Past, Present, and Future of ‘Students’ Right to their Own Language’ (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2005); Bruce Horner, “‘Students’ Right,’ English Only, and Re-Imagining the Politics of Language,” College English 63, no. 6 (July 2001): 741–55; Geneva Smitherman, “Black English/Ebonics: What It Be Like?” in Theresa Perry and Lisa Delpit, eds., The Real Ebonics Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). Scott Wible, “Pedagogies of the ‘Students’ Right’ Era: The Language Curriculum Research Group’s Project for Linguistic Diversity,” College Composition and Communication 57, no. 3 (February 2006): 442–78.

An article with closely related sensibilities is Arthur L. Palacas, “Liberating American Ebonics from Euro-English,” College English 63, no. 3 (January 2001): 326–52. Palacas has one shining moment of clarity: “The intentional move away from the teaching of grammar and sentence construction in composition graduate programs, for example, has unintentionally and ironically privileged the standard- speaking student to the detriment and exclusion of African American students and others from nonstandard language backgrounds, and it has truly hampered the effectiveness of teachers” (349). 4Smitherman, “CCCC’s Role in the Struggle for Language Rights,” College Composition and Communication 50, no. 3 (February 1999): 363. 5Ibid., 367.

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Counter-Argument 313

SRTOL Never Examines a “Right” to One’s Own Language

From the beginning SRTOL should have considered, seriously, the

meaning of a “right” to one’s own language. The absence of any such

discussion suggests a general shortcoming of SRTOL advocacy to this day:

conceptual carelessness.

Pursuant to the victories of the civil rights movement, “rights”-talk spread

to desires and demands far beyond the prerogatives of citizenship. Some

claims were justified under the heading of human rights, ethical treatment

owed people as such. Others were justified as cultural rights afforded

individuals by virtue of membership in a particular group. Still others,

perhaps most, were rights justified only in the aggressive insistence with

which they were claimed: my “right” to, apparently, whatever I want,

irrespective of how I might be violating obligations with greater weight than

what I just demanded out of the blue.

Note well, then, that the resolution’s first verb “affirm” and last verb

“uphold” suggest falsely that students already had the right to their own

language. The more accurate phrasing here is: “We are now granting students

a right that we just invented for them.” For good reason, American students

previously had been acceded no more “right” to use Farsi, German,

Cantonese, Spanglish, Cajun, or Ebonics in their essays than to identify

Bolivia as a river in Asia. SRTOL can point to no educational tradition,

professional principle, or ethical rule prohibiting teachers from correcting

student work. Teachers in every discipline at every grade level do that all the

time.

School curriculum is a pervasively benign case of “one social group

exerting its dominance over another,” i.e., learned adults initiating the young

into intellectual traditions, scholarly procedures, and forms of disciplinary

knowledge. It may overstate its claim, but generally the school is correct to

issue the same demands and offer the same rewards to students of every

“identity and style.” If a student comes from a culture that knows nothing and

cares nothing about algebra, the school will set out to teach it to him. If a

student comes from a culture that treats women as inferiors, the school will

not allow him to act disrespectfully toward female students, instructors, and

administrators.

SRTOL never acknowledges that the language of “rights” fits comfortably

in no instructional setting. I have every right to play the piano as badly as I

do. If I do go to a piano teacher, I have every right to dismiss everything he

314 Zorn

tells me, every right not to practice, every right to stagnate or get worse at the

keyboard. But then why bother taking lessons? School is mandatory up to a

certain age, but the principle is the same: In any class, I can claim the right

not to learn what is being taught (“You can’t make me!”). In doing so,

however, I relinquish the role of student and will incur penalties unmitigated

by my claiming the right not to learn.

Rights—actual, bona fide rights—invoke complementary obligations on

the part of others. If I have the right to enter a building during its posted

hours of operation, the person at the door must let me in. Anyone can claim

the “right” to speak or write any way he pleases, but nothing in that assertion

inhibits anyone else from judging the language unfit for the occasion. More

than just blowing smoke, SRTOL plants the seeds of Pyrrhic victory in

students; it tells them they win when they continue to speak and write their

vernacular despite all appearances (low grades, low test scores, bad

interviews, bad job performance ratings, etc.) to the contrary. This was my

mentors’ exact insight: the disadvantaged cannot afford Pyrrhic victories.

Throughout, SRTOL romanticizes failure as a heroic affirmation of

personal identity and community culture. One key strategy here is to pooh-

pooh differences like the following as merely “surface level”:

Hermione saw Herbert yesterday.

Hermione seen Herbert yesterday.

The first version appears in every textbook, handbook, and style manual

extant, while the second bespeaks great distance from books and the

company of educated people.6 Resisting segregation and marginalization

may well be heroic, but treating the markers of segregation and margin-

alization as badges of honor is not. It is, rather, to put a politically correct

spin on deficits imposed by the powerful on the unwilling.

Claims to a “right” to one’s own language are trumped by the obligation to

write well. If the assignment calls for writing in a language other than

English or for capturing nonstandard dialect, fine. Otherwise, Formal

Standard English remains the academic norm, and a student has no “right”

not to employ it with excellence.

6Less than twenty years before SRTOL, NCTE publications still called all such phrasings as “Hermione seen Herbert” and “Mary daddy home” illiteracies and recommended that English teachers attend to these problems in student writing first. See National Council of Teachers of English, The English Language Arts in Secondary School (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956), 379.

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Counter-Argument 315

SRTOL Offers No Consistent View on the Importance of Dialect

SRTOL never settles on the importance of dialect. In the space of five

pages, dialect goes from being a central feature of identity and intellection to

something trivial.

Urging English teachers to keep our dirty hands off, SRTOL argues early

on that dialects convey a unique worldview and guide speakers to unique

registers of insight, perception, and feeling. To master a dialect, then, is to

claim a culture and personal identity. On the cognitive level, dialect dictates

how easily students can read Standard English materials. Cultural dissonance

and the complexities of psycholinguistic processing make transfers between

dialect codes very difficult, so even the slightest differences between a

student’s vernacular and a textbook’s language will cause slow-down,

confusion, and inability to comprehend.

Soon after, a very different picture emerges. Now SRTOL depicts the

mastery of Edited American English as a piece of cake because dialects differ

only in a few, easily identified surface-level features; this is precisely why

students will be allowed to take Edited American English as an elective

course late in their academic careers.

The contradiction here goes straight back to the definition of dialect as “a

variety of language used by some definable group” and to the inclusion of

“whatever dialects in which [students] find their identity and style” under the

SRTOL purview. For no good reason and to no good effect, SRTOL

subsumes and treats as co-equals the “dialect” challenges facing Ebonics-

speaking schoolchildren, upper-class white Southerners, non-Anglophone

immigrants, skinheads, surfers, and computer geeks spouting jargon.

And so, while SRTOL may sound high-minded and progressive in

claiming, “A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial

variety will preserve its heritage of dialects,” this makes no sense whatsoever.

Linguistic localism in the United States lost ground to progress, significant

advances like the rise in educational attainment, the greater ease of

transportation, developments in communication technology, and the reduc-

tion of social discrimination.7 It was not bad when the South got less

isolated, less Dixie. It is not bad when children can communicate perfectly

7E.D. Hirsch, Jr., strikes just the right balance: “Therefore, without in the least discounting the losses incurred by the disappearance of small-group dialects, I find the conclusion inescapable that the benefits are greater than the costs.” The Philosophy of Composition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 49.

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with classmates and teachers with forebears from every corner of the planet.

It will not be bad when dialects like Faux-Contrite Steroid Abuser disappear

from our midst.

No individual, community, state, or nation is better off “preserving” the

local color embodied in foot binding, dog fighting, child labor, elder abuse,

bad hygiene, gay bashing, and language forms rooted in illiteracy and

isolation. In “The Case Against Romantic Ethnicity,” Gunnar Myrdal

concluded, “What is obviously needed in America is a much higher

identification with the nation as a whole.”8 SRTOL lurched woozily in the

other direction, toward “preserving” under-education, provincialism, ethnic

chauvinism, and political fragmentation.

SRTOL Wildly Overrates Its “Sophisticated” Knowledge in Sociology and Linguistics

The rhetoric of SRTOL is that of forestalling disagreement through the

tactics of shaming and bullying. Readers are led by the nose to select the

obvious choice in a “dilemma” faced by English teachers: Should we continue

to align our work with the American public’s uninformed prejudices, or should

we move forward with fresh knowledge? No one wants to be thought

backward and bigoted, so the latter choice seems obvious—until the reader

realizes that no substance accompanies the razzmatazz.

Claiming to center its argument on “sophisticated research in linguistics

and sociology,” SRTOL proceeds to make nothing but unsophisticated,

unconvincing sociolinguistic claims, especially in its answers to the question

“Who uses the dialect Standard English?” The authors successively identify

as that dialect’s speakers (1) the educated, (2) “those in power in the

community,” and (3) the middle class.

Clearly, no “identifiable group” of dialect speakers is marked off here.

Educated people appear in all social classes and typically lack power in any

community. Middle-class Americans may or may not have a higher education

and may or may not use Standard English regularly. In many communities,

the power-holders are not educated, middle-class, or speakers of Standard

English. And aren’t members of the hereditary upper class, not the middle

8Gunnar Myrdal, “The Case Against Romantic Ethnicity,” The Center Magazine 10, no. 1 (July-August 1974): 27.

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Counter-Argument 317

class, those who typically have the most power, the most education, and the

speaking style that most closely approximates the way books are written?

Denied its callow sociolinguistics, SRTOL is left to manipulate readers by

equating support for Standard English with bigotry. People who reject

classroom use of Ebonics, Hawaiian Pidgin, Spanglish, South Bostonese,

etc., are depicted as having disdain if not hatred for the speakers of these

dialects. They ascribe “inherent superiority” to the dialect of rich white

people because they inordinately admire wealth, power, and whiteness.

SRTOL’s plea to attend to “the distinction between speaking and writing”

points the way to rebuffing this reckless attack on personal character. With

perfect consistency, individuals can have respect if not outright love for

speakers of nonstandard dialects and still press to require Formal Standard

English in schools. Speakers from those dialect groups (like my Alabama

mentors) have advocated ardently for Standard English, as have political

activists against the hegemony of rich white people.9

In the quadrant of English devoted to on-the-record discourse, there is a

single, non-mythical Formal Standard, a level, not a dialect of the English

language as no “identifiable group” uses it except, by circular definition, the

literate. No dialect competition exists for this “grapholect”: no Spanglish

economics textbooks, Surfer lab reports, Pidgin insurance contracts, or Cajun

legal briefs. Insofar as the purpose of discourse is the careful, patient

explication of ideas, Formal Written Standard does have “inherent superior-

ity” over all vernaculars. The word choices available to educated writers, the

phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and clusters of paragraphs they can

configure, and the argumentative structures they can erect have but distant,

9Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist who first gave “hegemony” theoretical prominence, anticipated SRTOL’s exact error:

Someone who only speaks dialect, or understands the standard language incompletely, necessarily has an intuition of the world which is more or less limited and provincial, which is fossilized and anachronistic in relation to the major currents of thought which dominate world history. His interests will be limited, more or less corporate or economistic, not universal. While it is not always possible to learn a number of foreign languages in order to put oneself in contact with other cultural lives, it is at least necessary to learn the national language properly. A great culture can be translated into the language of another great culture.…But a dialect cannot do this.

Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Readings 1916–1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York: Schocken, 1988), 326–27. Unlike SRTOL’s authors, Gramsci understood “fossilized and anachronistic” provincialism for what it is.

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weak echoes in vernacular—for all the lyricism, emotional resonance, and

promising insights the vernacular might contain.

Feel the irony, then, in the level of English employed by SRTOL’s most

committed defenders:

Counter-hegemonic literacy training would focus both on how the

literacy training of some groups is not recognized and on how to

withhold recognition, or question the recognition—and concomitant

valuation—of the cultural capital of the literacy of dominant groups.10

To [insist upon Standard English] would be to again hypostasize

linguistic forms, as opposed to continuously weighing and challenging

the material social conditions under which specific language forms are

reified, elevated, and demoted. Our claim is that exclusive emphasis on

acquiring competence in writing as a means to equality, freedom, and

justice privatizes competence and so fails to maintain discursive

conditions through which being a competent writer comes to mean

equality, freedom, and justice.11

Defending street talk, the authors write the English farthest distant from street

talk, because street talk never suffices for intellectual complexity and careful

policy argumentation.

SRTOL Draws on and Feeds into a Reactionary Politics of Ethnic-Cultural Chauvinism

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville praised the forging of a

new, uniquely American person, novus homo, out of the various stocks and

strains of Europeans immigrating to our shores. The key for de Tocqueville

was that the original settlers all spoke English: “The tie of language is,

perhaps, the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind. All the

emigrants spoke the same tongue.”12 Later arrivals, non-Anglophones,

10Horner, “‘Students’ Right,’ English Only,” 753. 11Bruch and Marback, “Critical Hope,” 11. 12Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, vol. 1, rev. ed. (1835; New York The Colonial Press, 1899), 28.

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Counter-Argument 319

regularly kept their original language alive, but Standard American English

remained the “strongest and most durable tie” within an increasingly diverse

polity.

Once linguistic multiplicity overwhelms the Standard, the center cannot

hold, and the biggest losers will be those hustling in from the periphery.

Sensing imminent loss, champions of Standard American English have

sounded forth from within the African American community both before and

after SRTOL’s appearance.

A particularly powerful statement came in 1971 from the editorial board of

Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People (NAACP):

What our children need, and other disadvantaged American children as

well—Indian, Spanish-speaking, Asian, Appalachian, and immigrant

Caucasians—is training in basic English which today is as near an

international language as any in the world. To attempt to lock them in a

provincial patois is to limit their opportunities in the world at large....Let

our children have the opportunity, and be encouraged, to learn the

language which will best enable them to comprehend modern science

and technology, equip them to communicate intelligently with other

English-speaking peoples of all races, and to share in the exercise of

national power.13

Similar reactions were recorded to the Oakland Ebonics Resolution of 1997.

Cynthia Tucker, syndicated columnist of the Atlanta Constitution, decried the

board’s making “sub-standard scholarship, including poor grammar and

diction” into “a Black thing.”14 Like Tucker, film director Spike Lee was

ridiculed as a child for “speaking white,” and he has stated, “I’m not a fan of

Ebonics. I understand that African Americans have this duality to operate in

both worlds, but Ebonics shouldn’t be taught in school.”15 In another

context, Lee noted, “There’s something very sick where if you speak well

and you speak articulately, it’s looked at as being negative….That’s crazy

13“Black Nonsense,” quoted in Robbins Burling, English in Black and White (New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1973), 109. 14Cynthia Tucker, “Ebonics Is a Farce That Masks the True Nature of Poverty,” syndicated column, reprinted in Liberal Opinion Week, January 13, 1997. 15Jackie Corgan, “Spike Lee Casually Spells It Out,” Indiana Daily Student, October 10, 2002, https:// www.idsnews.com/news/story.aspx?id=24233&search=bob%20knight&section=search.

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when intelligence is thought of as being white and all the other stuff is being

black and being down.”16

In “‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’: A Retrospective,” Geneva

Smitherman contrasts all the “Unhip,” who continued to press for Standard

English, with the “Enlightened,” who fought instead “to bring mainstream

recognition and legitimacy to the culture, history, and language of those on the

margins.”17 The unhip seek an equitable sharing of the bounties of

contemporary life, but Smitherman detects a malicious “game plan” behind all

such overtures: “cultural and linguistic absorption of the Other into the dominant

culture, and indoctrination of the outsiders into the existing value system (e.g.,

Sledd 1972), to remake those on the margins in the image of the patriarch.”18

Where Smitherman sees evil “absorption” and “indoctrination,” others will

applaud the long-overdue triumph of inclusion and worry more about the

ethnic enclaves that the Smitherman/SRTOL “game plan” always brings to

mind. The fantasy is idyllic, a tapestry of peace, love, and understanding in

adjoining Meadows of Difference. The regular reality is ugly: distrusting,

avoiding, and even despising the Others, who are not “our kind.” Ethnic

16Leslie Williams, “Black Americans Already Have a Language—English,” San Francisco Examiner, January 20, 1997, A-19. See also Bill Cosby, “Élements of Igno-Ebonics Style,” Wall Street Journal, January 10, 1997, A-10.

For deeper, more scholarly discussion of Ebonics, see John Baugh, Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); John McWhorter, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care (New York: Gotham, 2003); Theresa Perry, “I ‘on Know Why They Be Trippin’: Reflections on the Ebonics Debate,” in The Real Ebonics Debate, 3–15; and Roger W. Shuy, “Bonnie and Clyde Tactics in English Teaching,” in Contemporary English: Change and Variation, ed. David L. Shores (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972), 278–88.

To explore the educational connections between dialect difference and language difference, see Lucy Tse, “Why Don_t They Learn English?”: Separating Fact from Fallacy in the U.S. Language Debate (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001); Kathryn Au, Multicultural Issues and Literacy Achievement (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006); Laurie Olsen, Made in America: Immigrant Students in Our Public Schools (New York: New Press, 1997); Dennis Baron, The English-Only Question (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); James Crawford, Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of “English Only” (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992); and Ronald Schmidt, Sr., Language Policy and Identity Politics in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000). 17Geneva Smitherman, “‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’: A Retrospective,” English Journal (January 1995): 21. 18Ibid., 25. See also Smitherman’s “Black English/Ebonics,” “CCCC’s Role,” and the introductions to Black English and the Education of Black Youth (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1981) and Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black Youth (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1986). The reference to SRTOL contributor James Sledd is very significant in that Sledd’s writings, especially “Bidialectalism: The Linguistics of White Supremacy,” deeply influenced SRTOL, subsequent SRTOL advocacy, and the general professional orientation toward political indoctrination in the classroom. “Bi- Dialectalism: The Linguistics of White Supremacy,” English Journal 58, no. 9 (December 1969): 1307– 15. See also “Doublespeak: Dialectology in the Service of Big Brother,” College English 33 (January 1972): 439–57.

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Counter-Argument 321

solidarity is about blood ties, not character virtues or moral principles. Given

its long, sordid history, how can the championing of blood ties be

enlightened or progressive?

It is very significant, very revealing, then, that the first person mentioned

in Smitherman’s “Retrospective,” bathed in the most flattering light, is

Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), who in Smitherman’s words “issued his

clarion call for ‘Black Power’ and thus charted a new course for the Civil

Rights Movement in America.”19 The testimonial sparks an immediate

realization: channeled by Smitherman, James Sledd, et al., Ture’s “clarion

call” pervades SRTOL. And then a second realization: this is to SRTOL’s

great discredit, and to the great harm done in its name ever since.

How tragic it was that Kwame Ture charted African Americans’ course

away from gaining the same successes enjoyed by other Americans! Ture

depicted integration as not worth trying; it was “a subterfuge, an insidious

subterfuge, for the maintenance of white supremacy.”20 Promulgating “anti-

racist racism,” Ture concluded that “this country cannot justify any longer its

existence” and “I do not want to be part of the American pie.” Left for black

Americans were separation within the United States—“We must cut

ourselves off from white people. We must form our own institutions, credit

unions, co-ops, political parties, write our own histories”—and third-world

solidarity, “to hook up with black people around the world.”21

In making Black Power militancy its political template, SRTOL

marginalized other “definable groups,” including integrationist African

Americans, no less than Eurocentrism ever had. Everywhere else in America

“anti-racist racism,” like regular-old racism, continued to lose decisively to a

principled veering toward color-blindness in both public and private life.22

19Smitherman, “‘Students’ Right,” 21. 20Stokely Carmichael, “Black Power” (speech, Berkeley, CA, October 1966), text available at http://www. americanrhetoric.com/speeches/stokelycarmichaelblackpower.html. 21Ibid. See also, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Statement on Black Power, http://www. answers.com/topic/student-nonviolent-coordinating-committee-founding-statement-1960. 22In Hawaii, for example, cultural rights activists argued for making Pidgin the general language of instruction in local schools, with Standard English to be offered as an elective if at all. Those interested in reading arguments from both sides of the debate, see Bruce Dunford, “Hawaii Debates Classroom Pidgin,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 27, 1999, A3, available at http://airwolf.lmtonline.com/news/archive/ 1128/pagea11.pdf; and Terri Menacker, “There’s a Place for Ebonics and Pidgin, Too,” Honolulu Star- Bulletin, February 1, 1997.

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SRTOL Clumps People into Relentlessly Homogeneous Groups

Difference is anything but slighted if we reject Romantic Ethnicity as an

organizing principle in schools and society-at-large. As Richard Rodriguez

observes in “Disunited We Stand,” losses in group identification pave the

way for gains in individuals’ originality, creativity, and independent

initiative. America organizes “around the first person, singular pronoun,”

Rodriguez writes, and the play of Difference among free-thinking, creative

individuals is exponentially more productive than the play of Difference

among clans, squadrons, and mobs of the like-minded.23

Anticipating and no doubt informing the dominant “Composition Theory”

of today,24 SRTOL sees no individuals and will permit teachers to see no

individuals in front of them. It trades throughout in races, social classes, and

crude ideological camps—the ruling, closed-minded, selfish, and bigoted

versus the victimized, warm, altruistic, and open-minded.

Privy to the insights, casts of mind, and language capabilities of each

student, writing instructors more than anyone on campus should appreciate

the huge differences, person-to-person, within SRTOL’s rigid, inviolable

categories. To all English compositionists with eyes wide open, constructs on

the order of “Black Language,” “the oppressed,” “Asian Americans,” and

“working-class culture” will seem overstated, reductive, and likely to lead to

terrible curriculum planning and terrible classroom teaching.

I cringe, for instance, when I read Monique Brinson’s description of Shel

Silverstein as simply “a white male author,” preparatory to “re-inventing” his

poem “Boa Constrictor” in Ebonics for her students.25 Reducing a creative

artist to those categories is the most distorting and mis-educative of short-

hands, as though it’s all the same whether we read Silverstein or Richard

23Richard Rodriguez, “Disunited We Stand,” in Creating America, ed. Joyce Moser and Ann Watters, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005), 156. 24In her tribute to James Berlin, for example, Linda Brodsky describes working hard to disabuse her students of the foolish notion that they are unique people and not “culturally constituted subjects.” “Remembering Writing Pedagogy,” JAC 17, no. 3 (Fall 1997), http://www.jacweb.org/Archived_volumes/ Text_articles/V17_I3_Brodkey.htm. Susan Miller, who favors “a proselytizing intellectual agenda” in class, attacks traditional composition teaching in similar terms: “An isolated ‘individual,’ imagined even now, after Althusser, as independently experiencing ‘life’ outside the language, rituals, and behaviors that construct it, becomes the imagined ‘real’ subject of the course.” Miller’s quotation marks around the words “individual,” “life,” and “real” tell most of the tale here. “Composition as a Cultural Artifact: Rethinking History as Theory,” in Writing Theory and Critical Theory, ed. John Clifford and John Schlib (New York: Modern Language, Association, 1994), 29. 25Monique Brinson, “Removing the Mask: Roots of Oppression Through Omission,” in The Real Ebonics Debate, 135.

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Counter-Argument 323

Rorty, Kurt Vonnegut, Henry James, Dave Barry, Allen Ginsberg, Stephen

King, Woody Allen, Walt Whitman, Zane Grey, William Faulkner, Robinson

Jeffers, Elmore Leonard, Pat Buchanan, Hunter S. Thompson, John Cheever,

John Updike, or Charles Bukowski—all pale-male Americans who therefore

think and write so similarly.

Silverstein’s art draws on many other categories of sociological descrip-

tion but mostly on his unique vision and creative talent. Brinson sees nothing

like a person in Silverstein, just a representative of two groups to which he

belongs. She sees her students exactly the same way, assuming in advance

that as African Americans they all need to run Silverstein’s simple, amusing

poem through racially coded filters before they can get anything out of it.

Brinson isolates her students even as Silverstein promises to include them,

and her provincial small-mindedness comes straight from SRTOL’s pages.

Like hers, its spirit is insular, hostile to young people’s wandering away from

the crowd, hostile then to education itself.

In sharpest contrast, Kenneth Clark, the distinguished psychologist whose

research informed Brown v. Board of Education, fondly recalled his own

teachers in Harlem “who did not consider themselves social workers….They

were asked to teach reading, arithmetic, grammar, and they did.” An eighth

grade teacher, Miss McGuire, “taught me to understand the beauty of an

English sentence. And she didn’t do it by worrying about my background.”

Another, Mr. Mitchell, “a blue-eyed blond WASP, taught us Shakespeare.

Those plays came alive, right in the center of Harlem….It had nothing to do

with color—the teacher’s or ours.”26

An integrationist to the end, Clark opposed Romantic Ethnicity and

cultural nationalism as strains of “parochialism.” In 1968 he wrote against

opening an all-black dormitory at the University of Chicago and later

resigned from the board of trustees of Antioch College protesting the plan for

a racially exclusive Afro-American Institute there. In his own teaching, Clark

tried to help students understand that “genuine pride in oneself can[not] be

based on anything as external as color.”27 In line with these views, Clark

favored teaching Standard English to all American students, regardless of

social background. Debating the classroom use of Ebonics with a black

Harvard graduate, Clark stated: “I would like these youngsters to speak the

26Nat Hentoff, The Nat Hentoff Reader (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001), 174–75. 27Ibid., 208.

324 Zorn

way you do, so that people will pay attention to them—even when they are

speaking nonsense, as you are now.”28

In his deep, mature, commanding voice—a golden trumpet to Ture’s thin,

wheezy kazoo—Clark issues a clarion call for setting high learning standards

for all students, the same standards whatever the individual’s race and

cultural style. The clearest right of students—soon to chart courses for their

own lives and the democracy’s future—is to a well-delivered liberal

education. Training no one to mindless orthodoxy, liberal education puts

into doubt everything students think they know. If in the end students keep

what they came with, it will be only after entertaining the live option of

wholly different beliefs. This marks the “liberating” part of liberal education,

the freeing of a mind to decide truth for itself, rationally. Rallying around

dialect and immersing children in local group-thought are qualitatively less

far-sighted.

SRTOL Tries to Shame English Teachers for First-Rate Professional Work

In the decades following SRTOL, English teachers have been censured as

repressive and racist—often by our own “theorists”—just for doing our job

competently. Instead of continuing to play the role of punching-bag we must

again assert due pride in our vocation.

The worth of our professional contribution can be measured in the ease

with which foundational civic documents and long-dead authors are still read

today. Slang and population demographics change daily. In balancing the

linguistic demands of the right-now, English teachers have allowed for

yesterday’s voices (the voices of oppositionality equally with those of assent)

to speak with immediate comprehension. We have had a hand as well in great

national gains in communication, knowledge, integration, social mobility,

and economic productivity.

A student’s “right” to semi-literacy is as hollow as his or her “right” to

master no mathematics beyond adding and subtracting. To follow SRTOL in

“preserving” nonstandard dialects is to welcome miscommunication, cultural

isolation, political fragmentation, and strict limits on students’ achievements

in school and beyond. To follow SRTOL in overrating students’ language

proficiency, however heart felt the desire to see the disadvantaged succeed, is

28Ibid.

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Counter-Argument 325

to delay the inevitable for students and expose our entire guild to correct

charges of dereliction of duty.

When English teachers provide purposeful instruction in Formal Written

Standard, we are the opposite of racist, elitist, and classist, not keeping the

gate closed but opening it wide. In his monumental study, The Americans:

The Democratic Experience, Daniel Boorstin noted:

As the schoolroom was expected to perform a remedial function, the

temptations were increased for insecure, upward-mobile teachers to

impose “Rules of Good English” on their insecure, upward-mobile

students. But there was also the Democratic Temptation—to flatter the

people by assuring them that whatever they were already doing was right

and best.29

Boorstin’s “Democratic Temptation” is surely one to avoid. As my Alabama

mentors perfectly intuited, if flim-flam flattery serves no one well, it serves

disadvantaged students especially poorly.

The one positive use today for SRTOL is as a negative heuristic, a road-

map to the wrong-headedness of “liberating” students by adding to their

underachievement and grievance. As a profession and as a nation, we would

maximize this positive potential by repudiating SRTOL and the entire body

of mis-educative “counter-hegemonic literacy training” that has followed in

its wake.

29Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage, 1973), 455.

326 Zorn