What do "White" people know?

In my linguistic anthropology class we are doing semantics, the study of meaning.  Yesterday, the class was presented with pairs of sentences, and asked to decide whether their meanings were the same or different.  For the purpose of this exercise, three kinds of "meaning" were considered: referential, social, and affective meaning.  Referential meaning has to do with what the sentence (or word or phrase) refers to externally: 'the dog' refers to a definite member of the genus Canis.  Social meaning is what the sentence implies about the speakers' membership in some social group or the context (e.g. formal, informal) surrounding the speech event.  Affective meaning is what the sentence implies about the internal state of speakers with regard to what they are saying.

An example might help.  Here are two sentences:

• I don't see anything.
• I don't see nothing.

These sentences are the same referentially; they both refer to my not having anything in my field of vision. (Yes, I know, some grammar nazi will try to chime in and claim that the second means that I do see something, but that's just nonsense.)  They are also the same affectively, in that we can't infer anything about the speaker's inner state.  However, they are different socially: we might infer that the speakers are different, with the second belonging to a group that uses non-standard English; or, we might infer that the same person said both but in different social contexts.

Now, in the class yesterday one of the pairs of sentences was this:

• Is there a Miss Smith in this office?
• Is it a Miss Smith in this office?

The students presented all sorts of contorted calculations attempting to construct different referential meanings for these two sentences. For example, the 'it' in the second dehumanizes Miss Smith; and so on.  Not one of these students recognized that the second sentence is from African American English, and that it's referential meaning is the same as the first one.  Not one.  I should add that the students in this class were all "White," or rather, none of them belonged to the US hypodescent group labeled "Black."

This led me to wander a little off topic in the class, by questioning whether the lack of knowledge that White people typically have about Black people contributes to situations like what we see happening in Ferguson, etc.  Of course, this little bit of AAE grammar is a little thing, almost inconsequential in itself, but not knowing lots of little things adds up to not knowing a lot.

And, why don't White people have this knowledge?  Why is it that at no time in their "language arts" classes have these students been presented with facts about the linguistic variation that exists all around them?  They've had to wait until they got to university, and then happened to take linguistics for one reason or another.  And some of them are English Education majors, destined to themselves be language arts teachers.

The answer, it seems to me, is that we don't value what Black people know.  To the extent that it differs from more mainstream English, their speech is just a broken, deficient form of that wider English.  Nothing to see here; move along...

My problem with Maya Angelou (and Jesse Jackson, and...)

This post is prompted by Maya Angelou's passing a few days ago. I was privileged to see her perform at UNF some years back, and of course she was very, very good at what she did.  What she was not good at is being a linguist.  And she's not alone.

When the Oakland School Board tried to declare African American Vernacular English (AAVE, or Ebonics) a language separate from English back in 1996, a shitstorm ensued, as everyone in the country (it seemed) came down on them.  The school board made two fatal errors:

(1) They used the term "genetic" in trying to trace the West African roots that help make AAVE different from English. This was a mistake, because people were able to take a descriptive term out of context and accuse the school board of claiming that there were "genes for" AAVE, or something like that, which is of course biologically false. 

(2) In attempting to claim the status of "language" for AAVE, they broke a rule established by Max Weinreich back in the 1940s: "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."  Nearly all linguists know that there is no qualitative difference between a "language" and a "dialect" and that, indeed, everyone speaks a dialect.  Languages are social constructions of convenience that encompass in some cases widely divergent dialects; dialects, the stuff on the ground, are what is real.

So... by making these errors, they left themselves open to all sorts of ridicule.  We can ignore the ridicule coming from the Cracker class, at least for now.  But the ridicule also came from people who one wishes had known better, and the result was yet more evidence that we need linguistics and anthropology taught to everybody, in the public schools:

Maya Angelou:

• The very idea that African American language is a language separate and apart is very threatening, because it can encourage young men and women not to learn standard English.

Jesse Jackson:

• I understand the attempt to reach out to these children, but this is an unacceptable surrender borderlining on disgrace. . . . It's teaching down to our children and it must never happen.
  
  And, perhaps most disturbing...
  
• You don't have to go to school to learn to talk garbage.
  

No, Maya, what encourages students "not to learn standard English" is just the opposite: pretending that there's no linguistic difference, that AAVE consists of nothing but mistakes and deviations from the standard, is what fools students into imagining that they already know the standard.

And no, Jesse, making students aware of the systemic linguistic differences between AAVE and standard is not "teaching down" to them; it is respecting their intelligence and ability to live up to what ought to be our expectations for them.

And of course, Jesse, AAVE is not "garbage."  Decades of research by far too many language scholars to list here has shown that if AAVE is "garbage," then so is English and every other language on the planet.  And that was a pretty despicable claim for one who claims to be a civil rights leader.

The reality is, we need people with real knowledge about languages and culture (i.e. linguists and anthropologists) in leadership roles in this country.  Instead, we get people who are illiterate in these areas, people who are only capable of vomiting up what amount to racist claims.  Yes, racist.

By the way, there were even Senate hearings on this.  If you ever want to be driven to poke your eyeballs and eardrums out with toothpicks, watch US Senators try to ask questions of linguists.

A (post-) modern problem

I think postmodernism has created a generation of people who are afraid to commit themselves to an answer to a question, even when the question involves empirical data to be examined.  For example, my final exam in linguistics, just given, contained the following problem:

Review. Examine the data from Tongan (Polynesia). Then answer the questions. Assume that this data set is representative. (3 points)

[tauhi]   'to take care of'       [sino]   'body' 

[sisi] 'garland'                     [totonu] 'correct'
[motu] 'island                     [pasi] 'to clap'
[mosimosi] 'to drizzle'          [fata] 'shelf'
[motomoto] 'unripe'             [movete] 'to come apart'

Based on the evidence, the sounds [t] and [s] are: ___ Contrastive?  ___ Predictable?
Defend your choice.

Now, the correct answer is obtained by noticing that [s] always occurs before [i], and that [t] occurs before other vowels.  Thus [t] and [s] are predictable. In linguistic terms, we can rite a phonological rule:

/t/  ➔ [s] / __ [i];  [t] elsewhere.

However, I didn't require them to write the rule out.  As long as they noticed the distribution of these two sounds, they got credit.  The problem comes when, despite the admonition to take the data set as representative, stuff like this shows up (my emphasis):

[t] is predictable because it is used the same way in the middle of the text and usually following or followed by by a vowel. [s] is also following/followed by a vowel which seems to always be [i].

No, it doesn't seem as though [s] is always followed by [i]; in this data set it is the case that [s] is always followed by [i], and [t] is followed by vowels other than [i].  And then there's this:

[s] is always followed by [i] in Tongan, and [i] can't follow [t]. We don't know if they are phonemes or allophones though, it could be a coincidence that they don't follow [t]'s with high front vowels, maybe [ti] is [di] and we just don't have that data, or

I should point out that we've been working these kinds of problems all semester, and all semester I've stressed that the data sets used in the problems are to be taken as representative of the languages as a whole.  I really do think that postmodernism, despite the good things it's done for us, has damaged students' ability to commit to the solution of a data-based problem.

Anthropology News essays on science

Anthropology News has a series of essays on science up on its website.  My contribution is titled Illustrating Science Through Language.  My essay argues that the scientific method can be applied to cultural artifacts and is not limited to quantitative analysis.  The essay is essentially a lesson plan that introduces the concepts of data, evidence, contrast, objectivity, hypothesis, falsification, and theory through the analysis of a small piece of language.  By acting as the data-collectors, students play a key role in working through this exercise and also begin to develop an idea of what linguistic fieldwork is like.

A simple (?) question

I just gave the students in my summer Introduction to Anthropology class a "practice test" to make sure they are familiar with Blackboard, which I use for online testing, communicating, and discussing things with students between our class sessions.  One of the questions was:

Which is the most valid statement regarding human evolution?

1. Humans evolved from chimpanzees.
2.  Humans evolved from theropod dinosaurs.
3. Humans evolved from lobe-finned fishes.
4. Humans evolved from bats.

Interestingly, 100% of the students answered (1), chimpanzees.  The correct answer is (3), lobe-finned fishes.  Humans did not evolve from chimpanzees, humans and chimpanzees both evolved from a common ancestor that was neither a human nor a chimpanzee.  And this common ancestor, like all tetrapods, evolved from lobe-finned fishes.

Students didn't lose any points over this, but it is instructive. This is a sort of snapshot of the level of general awareness and understanding of evolution that people have, if they are forced to think about it.  I wonder what would have been the result if I had included a choice like "Humans evolved from Adam and Eve, who were created in the Garden of Eden some 6,000 years ago."

End of semester: The good

This is Kiersten Bradley and me, after our reception Friday for our anthropology graduates. Kiersten is our Outstanding Anthropology Graduate for 2012-13, and after doing way more linguistics-related credit hours (12) with me than anyone probably should, she's off to graduate school at the University of Colorado/Boulder in.... Linguistics!

In addition to our standard introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, Kiersten took a course on American English dialects, and also two independent studies.  In one she explored the evolution of the concept of  linguistic relativity (aka the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis).

In the second she began getting a handle on phonological analysis by collecting data from Korean speakers, transcribing, and looking for the sound patterns.  Although she may not know it yet, the most valuable lesson she might have taken away from this exercise is that analyzing a language is hard, and almost never goes smoothly. 

Anyway, over the years I've managed to send a small handful of students to graduate school, and it's always gratifying to be a tiny part of the stream of linguistic anthropology that began with Franz Boas, ran through my mentor, MJ Hardman, and, modestly, on through me.  So, MJ, meet Kiersten, your newest grand-student.

God's grade inflation, and more...

Tomorrow is the start of classes at my school.  I'll be doing Linguistic Anthropology (36 students), Physical Anthropology (28 students), and an Introduction to Anthropology (127 students signed up, but the cap is 200).  These are all undergraduate classes: we have no graduate program in Anthropology.  And thus, no teaching assistants for grading, etc.

Meanwhile....  A couple of days ago a small plane carrying three people crashed into a home south of here.  The only survivor was the person who was at home.  She came out pretty much unscathed and declared "God is good."

Uh huh.  God puts four people in extreme jeopardy, kills three of them, and is pronounced "good."  I wouldn't give a student a "good" if they made 25% on a test. God must be benefitting from grade inflation.

A brief thought on US education

A recurring ad on the tv lately talks about the things we need to do to improve education. They mention investing in new buildings and up-to-date technology. But their takeaway is investment in teachers: better preparation, support, etc. OK, but wait.... Nobody (ever?) mentions the real and most serious problem: children going to school who live in poverty. If we ended child poverty, the other things would pretty much take care of themselves I suspect. Finland did it, and so could we, but we have to first shed our national cultural fantasy that poverty is a natural part of the social and cultural landscape.

Language(s) in schools

Hear ye, hear ye!  Children attending Irish-language primary schools outperformed their peers in English-only schools in mathematics and, wait for it...  English!  A lttle dated, but it's never really too late.

I feel not so alone

Way back in March 2010 I wrote a post about Liberty University in which I suggested that Liberty's accreditation should be yanked because they teach creation "science."  On a recent episode of "Real Time" Bill Maher echoed my sentiment, but in a funnier way. The stimulus was Presidential candidate Willard "Mitt" Romney's delivering of the commencement speech at Liberty:

Irritable vowel syndrome

This is the sort of thing that makes my head hurt.

This morning while looking through some old files I came across a "language arts" exam given to middle school students in Carriacou (Grenada) in 1983.  The very first question:

Put a ring around the word that has two vowels
(a)  man     (b)  pet     (c)  gram     (d)  boat

Okay, now, we all know what the expected "right" answer was, don't we?  Of course.  It was (d) boat.  Because the word boat has two vowels.  Except that it doesn't, really.  The word boat, pronounced in Grenada as [bot], has one vowel (some speakers produce something like [bʷot] with a very brief labiovelar glide- still not two vowels, though).  The oa spelling of this vowel is an artifact of the convoluted history of the English writing system, not an accurate reflection of the present underlying phonology of English.

Of course, what's going on here is the perpetuation of the ancient language = writing meme, by which any question about language is assumed to refer to the writing system, not the actual spoken language.  Indeed, here in the US of A young people spend their K–college years attending "language arts" and "composition" classes that almost universally focus on writing (spelling, punctuation, etc.), not language.

Anyway, that was 1983.  My head is hurting now because yesterday, in a guest lecture on language, I asked the 100+ students in the lecture hall how many vowels are there in English?  And after all these roughly 25 years of teaching about language, the question still works: they still fall into the language = writing trap.  Their universal answer: five, maybe 6 (a, e, i, o, u, sometimes y).  I then astounded them by pulling out my twelve vowel sounds, as in the following words:

beat                     loot
bit        bird         look
bait                     coat
bet       bud         caught
bat                      cot

A part of me enjoys tricking students in this way, semester after semester.  And it's so predictable.  But another part of me bemoans the fact that I can still do it so easily.  Students in the English-speaking world simply do not, apparently, receive substantive instruction on the nature of language, or the nature of English.

Will they ever?

Sometimes, students get it!

So, I taught a section of our Peoples and Cultures of the World (a junior-level course for non-majors) in the Summer A term; we met twice a week for six weeks, three and a half hours per session, and there were 45 students in the class.  I treat this course as an introduction to cultural anthropology, with a rich variety of "peoples" and "cultures" to illustrate the concepts.  The peoples we met included the Aymara (Central Andes), Yanomama (Orinoco Basin), Baka (Cameroun), Maya (Yucatan, Mexico), Maasai (East Africa), and of course Carriacou, where I've done fieldwork.

The final topic of the course, as I teach it, deals with globalization and the culture of capitalism.  For this subject matter I like to bring the students back to themselves, by including "us" as one of the "peoples and cultures of the world."  One way that I sometimes do this is by showing them the first 30 minutes or so of the John Sayles film Matewan.  This true story of the May 1920 Matewan Massacre deals with the culture of capitalism by showing how West Virginia coal miners in the early 20th century had to deal with exploitative coal operators, dangerous working conditions, and the threat of violence on the part of "agents" hired by the coal companies to prevent the miners from organizing themselves into unions.  It also touches on globalization, by showing coal company owners attempting to replace striking miners with African Americans and immigrants from Italy.

This time, I got an unexpected reaction to this bit of film.  A student, in her final reflexive essay, wrote this:

Also, I wanted to thank you for showing the video about the West Virginia coal miners. I am from West Virginia and came from a family of coal miners. I don’t think people in the United States understand how dangerous coal mining still is today. My Uncle was a survivor of the Sago Mine explosion that happened about 4 years ago and it hit my family with the realization that something can happen at any second. Even though devastating disasters like this still exist today, the mines do not take all the safety precautions to prevent explosions from happening in the future. I hope that this video has opened the eyes of some of the people in class to realize that the coal used to heat their homes, is mined in dangerous working conditions. 

 Unfortunately, I didn't read the essays until the course was over, and thus I could not go back into class and try to generate some extra discussion.  But at least there is satisfaction in knowing that something in the course was deeply relevant for at least one student, and that's a good feeling.

To laugh or to cry?

I had a student this morning who came to class with no paper or writing implement. He wrote his answer to our in-class activity on his cell phone, then sent it to me as an email.

New link: Linguistics in the Classroom

I have added a link to a blog titled "Linguistics in the Classroom," written by Ann Evans at Montclair State University.  Ann's description of the site follows:

This blog is meant to help teachers show their students how language is constructed, how meaning is made, and what the role of language is in our lives.  It contains information and exercises to illustrate linguistic ideas and principles at the word, sentence, and paragraph level, and within language communities.  Each point and exercise is introduced simply, with examples, and is usually meant to take ten minutes or less.

This  blog is the continuation of an article published in the Spring 2011 issue of the Duke University journal Pedagogy.
Ann Evans is an Adjunct Professor of Writing at Montclair State University.  She has an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from Montclair State, and an M.A. in English from New York University.  Besides English, she speaks French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Greek.

If you are looking for exercises and linguistics-oriented explanations to share, especially with writing-troubled students, check it out.

US teacher pay in international context

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has put out a table comparing teacher pay to GDP in a number of countries.  Imperfect as it might be, I think it says something about the priority that teacher pay receives in these countries.  In any case, the US does not show up well, which is not surprising since "education" is not highly valued here, despite the lip service it receives.

Notice that Finland, cited as a "top performing nation," is not far above the US.  Still, Finnish teachers probably receive far more benefits (health care, education, retirement, etc.) than US teachers do.

[Thanks to PZ Myers at Pharyngula for linking to this table, which is posted here.

Taking the "broken" out of "broken English"

My presentation at the meetings of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics last week centered on sharing a teaching strategy for reducing the prejudice I encounter, in my classes and elsewhere, toward "non-standard" varieties of language. These include African American Vernacular English (AAVE), any of a number of creole languages (Jamaican, Haitian, etc.), and even my own Upper South variety of Appalachian English.

This is clearly a problem that isn't going to go away soon. Every semester for the last 20+ years I have faced a new group of students in my introductions to linguistics, and every semester these students bring with them the very same nonsense about the nature of language, and the nature of English. Some of that nonsense: English has five vowels (because there are five or six, depending on how you count, vowel letters); the articles (the, a/an) are adjectives that modify their nouns; sentences containing "double negatives" actually are affirmative; dialects that deviate from "standard English" are inferior, stupid, illogical, etc.; and so on, and on.

Because I work on "non-standard" languages, I may have heard all this more than most. In 1979, while gathering data for a description of the English Creole spoken in Carriacou, Grenada, I had one person, a visitor from Canada, tell me that Carriacou people had no right to their own words for things (mug for pitcher, for example), and that their children should be taken away and placed in standard-speaking homes because if they spoke Creole all their lives, their brain cells would deteriorate. During the same fieldwork, a Grenadian physician told me that if I were successful in showing that Creole speakers followed grammar rules, that would show that they were human beings worthy of better treatment than that usually dealt out to them. And that same year, in the National Geographic Magazine, Ethel Starbird wrote that people of St. Vincent, Grenada, and the Grenadines speak English "with a certain free-form style."

So, over the years I have developed a way of approaching the problem. It involves some linguistic sophistication, so I usually do it toward the end of an introductory linguistics course. Now and then, though, I do it as a Lone Ranger exercise (ride in, fire a few silver bullets, ride out). This might be, for example, a literature course in which students are reading a lot of AAVE. The target language is most often AAVE or Appalachian, but sometimes I'm asked to do the exercise for Gullah in a course on the peoples and cultures of the Sea Island, and every couple of years I do it for Caribbean Creole in my own course on the West Indies. The language can change, but the method and many of the details remain much the same. For this iteration, I am using the English Creole spoken in Carriacou.

The strategy is to begin with examples of things people notice that make Creole seem unlike English. Usually, this involves features that are "missing," features that may be attributed to a lack of education although in fact they are simply features of the language in question. Here are a couple of things that might be perceived as "missing" in Creole:

The plural suffix (-s)
The possessive suffix (-'s)
Dental fricatives (the "th" sounds)

The trick is to show that these features are not necessary for something to be a human language. For example, many languages do not overtly mark number on nouns. Two that come quickly to mind are Bambara, a West African language, and....  wait for it.....  French!  Here's how this looks (note that in Bambara, the number follows the noun):

English:     one cow...      three cows
Creole:       wan kow...     tri kow
Bambara:   mishi kele...   mishi saba
French:       une vache...   trois vaches

Okay, I know what you're thinking: the French plural vaches has an -s on the end, so it's not an example. But here's the thing: both vache and vaches are pronounced [vaʃ], roughly the first syllable in the name "Vashti."

Let's take the possessive suffix. Note the following.

English:     Anansi's shoulder
Creole:      Anansi shōlda

It's pretty easy to find languages that do not require marking on nouns for possessive.

Bhasa Indonesian:     kuda Ali   (Ali's horse)
Urhobo Isoko:           emete ose  (daughter [of] father; father's daughter)

So, neither a plural affix nor a possessive is required for something to be a human language. But what about those dental fricatives?

English:     thin,  then
Creole:       tin,  den

It turns out that the sounds [θ], as in thin, and [ð] as in then, are quite rare among the world's languages.  And furthermore, we can say that Creole speakers use [t] and [d] as substitutes for them, much as English speakers substitute an aspirated alveolar [tʰ] for unaspirated dental [t̪] in Spanish words like taco.  This process of sound substitution happens whenever languages collide, so it's ton be expected in creole languages.

So, something doesn't need possessive or plural affixes, or "th" sounds, to be considered an example of human language. But what does it need? We'll tackle that issue in the next installment.



Starbird, E. 1979. Taking it as it comes: St. Vincent, the Grenadines, and Grenada. National Geographic 156 (September 1979), pages 399-425.

Catching up...

So many weird things have been happening lately, it's hard to keep up and sometimes the AAADD (Age Affected Attention Deficit Disorder) just halts you in your tracks. But here's an attempt:

Last Tuesday, Kentucky voters, a perpetually clueless lot apparently, chose eye surgeon Randal "Rand" Paul, son of Ron Paul, as the Republican candidate for the US Senatorial elections to be held later this year.  The next day, in a painfully witless performance on The Rachel Maddow Show, Rand stuck to his position that owners of private businesses, like, say, restaurants, should be able to refuse service to African Americans or anyone else, all the while insisting that he, himself, would not frequent such establishments and that the "free market" would take care of them. I wonder...  He also suggested that the Americans with Disabilities Act should be repealed. And, just to put the ass in dumbass, he claimed that President Obama is being too harsh in blaming British Petroleum for the Gulf of Mexico clustershag that, as I write, is destroying the wetlands around the Mississippi River delta and moving east toward Florida. After all, he said, accidents do happen. As someone else (I've lost track) responded, that's just what you want to hear from the person who's performing surgery on your eyes.

And for good measure, John Stossel, one-time champion for consumers' rights but now a pathetic media whore for FAUX News, backed up Paul, saying that he thought that part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act should be repealed.

The Paul's, and Stossel, claim to be "libertarians," but they're the wrong kind of libertarian. They belong to the selfish, hyper-individualistic, anti-social Ayn Rand-inspired right-libertarians. There are other libertarians, the left-libertarians or libertarian socialists, who combine a desire for reasonable individual freedom with the realization that humans are social animals and that there are many social functions and problems that can only be handled at the scale of government.

Moving on...  Also this week, the Texas State School Board voted to doom Texas schoolchildren to a right-wing revisionist fantasy view of history that, among other things, ignores Thomas Jefferson while making a hero of Joe McCarthy, claims that the Founders intended the US to be a christian nation, and suggests that the United Nations challenges US sovereignty. They also tried to replace "Atlantic Slave Trade" with "Atlantic Triangular Trade," I suppose because that sounds so much more, you know, bloodless, but that, at least, failed to make it into the new history standards.

I wonder what'll happen next week...

Sucking the fun out of language

Last week a friend (thanks, Bob) sent me this link to an April 19 New York Times interview with the physicist Sean Carroll, whose new book From Eternity to Here explores the physics of time. I found his comments on time interesting; more about that later, perhaps. What I want to focus on first is his complaint about the unpopularity of physics:

Whenever you say you’re a physicist, there’s a certain fraction of people who immediately go, “Oh, I hated physics in high school.” That’s because of the terrible influence of high school physics. Because of it, most people think physics is all about inclined planes and force-vector diagrams. One of the tragedies of our educational system is that we’ve taken this incredibly interesting subject — how the universe works — and made it boring.

My impression, after teaching linguistics for over twenty years, is that this pretty much applies to the study of language as well. People spend years in the public education system having the fun and wonder of language sucked out of them by "language arts," "English," and "English composition" teachers. These teachers do this by focusing on things that really have little to do with language, such as spelling, punctuation, "correct" grammar, and so on. The result is that when they arrive at college, students have been so thoroughly mystified (in the Marxist sense) about the nature of language that they have real problems approaching the subject from the perspective of scientific linguistics.

Here are a few ways that this mystification manifests itself:

• Confusion of language with writing. We live in a hyperliterate society. So, for most of their school careers, what students learn about "language" is really about the writing system. They carry this training into linguistics by insisting on referring to symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), such as [p] and [a], as "letters." This leads them to say that the "first letter" in the English word pot ([pʰɑt] in IPA)  is aspirated. For some, taking points off never helps.
• Confusion about parts of speech. The definite and indefinite determiners (the, a) are "adjectives"; the my in my homework is a "possessive adjective" (actually, it's also a determiner); etc.
• Confusion of grammar with social rules. The classic example here is, of course, the "don't use double negatives" rule, which is a rule about social acceptability, like not farting in public, and has absolutely nothing to do with English grammar as constructed by linguists.
  
• Confusion about the meaning of linguistic diversity. Language arts programs focus on creating unity out of the natural diversity of human language by molding students into producers of some idealized, homogenized version of "standard" English. Instead of seeing diversity as one aspect of human creativity, students come to believe that non-standard usage results from lack of education, mental deficiency, laziness, etc.

These examples of mystification, and others, show up every semester in my linguistics classes. What does it mean? Apparently, there is little or no change, no progress toward enlightenment, in the way children are taught about the nature of language in the K-12 system.

One might conclude that the function of language arts education (perhaps most education) is the assembly-line production of interchangeable, unimaginative, and obedient carbon units, prepared to serve a predatory capitalist system that works best when its victims think that important elements of their world, like language, cannot be investigated and interpreted except by the standards of the Masters.