Closing the Gap
There is, without question, a language of privilege in America that excludes those who do not speak it fluently.
Again from The Instruction of Imagination:
Every speaker of language, every one of us, walks around with two mismatched worldviews—private-experiential and social-linguistic—and the mismatches themselves are variable. Not only is there an external experiential gap between us as individuals; there is also an internal gap within ourselves, between ourselves as experiential creatures and ourselves as language users. This foundational fact . . . explains many of the particular properties of word meanings, much of the structural complexity of language, and the inherent fragility of the process of linguistic communication. It is where the drama of linguistic relativity takes place: the landscape and experience are caught in a never-ending cycle of bi-directional influence, both at the collective and individual level. The fact that different individuals live in variable mismatches explains much of the variability in individual communicative behavior, capacity, motivation, and success. And it explains the connection between language and social power: communicative success rises as the space between the two worldviews shrinks, and the process of mutual-identification is thus also a struggle for symbolic control within the community.
It is noteworthy—albeit not altogether surprising—that this view corresponds so well with E.D. Hirsch, Jr.'s ideas about cultural literacy. Even the title of this article about those ideas, Cultural Literacy and the Language of Upward Mobility, provides a striking demonstration of this correspondence. Readers are encouraged to pick up books by Hirsch to get a more complete picture of the similarities.
There is, without question, a language of privilege in America that excludes those who do not speak it fluently. And it is within our power as educators and policymakers to influence children's acquisition of that language. But doing so will require a degree of clarity and candor to which we are unaccustomed when we talk about education. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has long been making the social justice case for giving disadvantaged children access to the knowledge and language that have long been assumed by the privileged and powerful.
To a degree that can be awkward to acknowledge, language is a cultural artifact, filled with assumed knowledge, allusions, and idioms that are a reflection of the culture that built, uses, and sustains it. Not for nothing did Hirsch title his 1987 bestseller on reading and language Cultural Literacy.
