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Originally Posted by Prudence
Or is it just Ebonics that you don't like? So in a Louisiana school yard, if two friends over here were speaking to one another in Creole that would be fine, but the two kids over there speaking in Ebonics would be given detention and a lecture on how that is inappropriate language?
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I sure hope that isn't an implication of racism.
No, what I want is education to be about....education. Are there supplemental programs in Louisiana helping students feel good about speaking with a Creole dialect? Maybe there are...I don't know. If there are, I would object.
Frankly, what these kids speak at home is no problem with me. How they speak on the playground is not of concern to me.
What my concern is is that there is too much focus on what is unimportant in schools while so much else that is important lags.
Since
Dr. Thomas Sowell (writing about a similar thing in Oakland, CA) -
Whether it was word meaning, paragraph meaning, or mathematics, the children in the Harlem schools generally did just as well as the children in the schools on the lower east side. Sometimes the Harlem children did a little better, sometimes the lower east side children did a little better, but it was neck and neck all the way. In those days, excuses about "black English" were unnecessary because black children were not miles behind everybody else, as they are too often today. Why were ghetto children better able to hold their own with white working-class children more than half a century ago, when there was more poverty and discrimination than today -- and when their parents averaged only an elementary school education? Part of the reason is that they did not have distractions like "ebonics" or the kinds of belligerent, paranoid and provincial attitudes being promoted by race hustlers.
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http://www.townhall.com/thcc/content...owe020797.html )