Essay #1, First Draft
English
February 12, 2013

Literacy is About Communication, Not Group Loyalty After reading the articles by Stephanie Roach, James Paul Gee, and Lisa Delpit, I find myself agreeing very strongly with Delpit. Roach and Gee both imply that trying to teach a standard type of literacy might be violating the special cultural qualities of poor students and students of color. It’s true that the United States of America is made up of many ethnic and racial groups, and many of them have special ways of thinking and expressing themselves. But the key to success in this country is learning standard literacy, which is common to everybody. You really can’t succeed in America if you don’t first master this common language that we all share. The simple question raised in the famous Newsweek cover article in 1975, “Why Johnny Can’t Write,” was: Are American children learning to write, and if not, where is the problem? This is a simple question, and it cannot be avoided, as Roach does, by accusing the author of that article, Merrill Sheils, of trying to alarm people about something that she doesn’t really prove, using the few examples of bad writing she has in the article. The fact is that American school children don’t write very well, and Roach knows that. Thousands of studies and journal articles since 1975 have confirmed this sad fact. Roach cannot avoid this reality by agreeing with Humpty Dumpty that “words can mean whatever Humpty wants them to mean.” Nor does she make her case by quoting a letter to Newsweek replying to Sheils’ article as follows: “If u cn rd this, why should I learn 2 right like u do?” This kind of cute mis-spelling proves nothing. People write like that today in emails and Twitter, but it is not because they are illiterate. I am absolutely certain that the person writing the above response was very literate. But Gee is doing something even uglier in his article. He is defending the right of a minority subculture to use its own “discourse,” rather than learn the dominant discourse, which he calls the “secondary use of language.” Proper English literacy is not “secondary.” It’s the common way literate Americans communicate with each other, and this common language is a very precious thing. Gee gives us a hint of what he’s really up to when he writes that “discourses are intimately related to the distribution of social power and hierarchical structure in society” (2). There is some truth to this, because it is important for subcultures to hold on to what makes them unique. But it is also true that they will not be able to hold on to anything valuable if they cannot also function in the 21st American economy and society on its own complex terms. What Gee and others like him are really trying to do is defend the right of these subcultures to remain stubbornly ignorant. He is encouraging them to be defiant, and share his political anger at American culture. In this way academics like Gee make themselves more powerful and full of virtue, by seeming to defend the powerless and defenseless. In fact, by encouraging minorities not to become literate, they are condemning them to lives of failure. The only way to make up for this failure is for society to give the poor and minorities what America apparently owes them for being oppressed and different. The fact is that Gee probably has tenure, and is not at risk of losing his academic position just because poor children never learn what he calls the “secondary discourse” in America. He does not share the risk they are taking by following his advice. Lisa Delpit sees right through Gee and people who share his opinions. First of all, she strongly disagrees with his view that people are locked into their primary discourse. As she puts it, Gee’s argument suggests a dangerous kind of determinism as flagrant as that espoused by the geneticists: instead of being locked into your place by your genes, you are now locked hopelessly into a lower-class status by your discourse. ((546)
She also disagrees that “forcing” a common discourse on minority students is oppressive, and that an individual who is born into one discourse with one set of values may experience major conflicts when attempting to acquire another discourse with another set of values. (546-547) This is very similar to a debate that raged for many years about bilingual education. The argument was made that forcing Hispanic and Hispanic-American students to learn English immediately was a violation of their cultural rights. The fact is that as beautiful as minority cultures are, and as much as we should value and respect them, a young student will not be able to make it in America without a mastery of proper English and good literacy. Tomorrow night, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida will be giving the Republican reply to President Obama’s State of the Union Address. He will be doing it first in English, and then in Spanish. Whatever you may think of his conservative politics, he is a brilliant man, highly educated, and fluent and eloquent in both languages. We cannot believe that Senator Rubio would have reached this position, and a real chance to be President, if his English and literacy were not excellent. We should not deny any American child the same opportunity.