By the time middle-class kids reach school, Hasan concluded, they have had considerable experience with the decontextualised language that characterises official pedagogic discourse. Perhaps most importantly, these kids experienced a bigger sense of the world as a seamless part of the flux of the activities of living. The cultures of schooling decisively prefer the middle-class modes of talking and meaning. Hasan’s follow-up study showed how much teachers talk like the mothers of the middle class. Fifty years after Bernstein and Labov wondered about the nexus between language and class, the inequities of schooling are as intractable as ever. School funding policies have constructed a sense of entitlement for private schools. And by hijacking intelligence, IQ testing has helped create and defend two systems of schooling. Education – the key to overcoming social inequity – is largely organised to reproduce it. It would take a real education revolution to create “tomorrow’s optimism in the context of today’s pessimism”. theconversation/does-the-way-we-speak-affect-our-future-23503?
Posted on: Sat, 08 Mar 2014 06:49:10 +0000