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International Socialism, April 1974

 

Sarah Cox

Language and Class

 

From International Socialism, No.68, April 1974, p.31.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

Tinker, Tailor ... The Myth of Cultural Deprivation
Edited with an introduction by Nell Keddie
Penguin 45p.

Language and Class
Harold Rosen
Falling Wall Press, 12p.

COMPREHENSIVE EDUCATION was expected to end the inequalities of our educational system. When it failed to bring a rush of labourers’ children into the corridors of power, educationalists had to look for another theory to explain why working-class children, especially black working-class children, fail at school. The most fashionable theory, and one that influences modern educational policies and practice, is based on the work of Basil Bernstein.

For many years, Bernstein’s work has only been available in learned journals, so the theory has assumed a life of its own. He claims to have been mis-represented and mis-interpreted, and now that a selection of his articles has been published in paperback (Class, Codes and Control, Paladin, 75p) it is possible for those who can wade through the confusions and contradictions to judge for themselves.

Anyway, the theory as usually presented is that working-class children are unable to take advantage of the educational goodies offered them at school because they are culturally or linguistically deprived. Working-class culture, it is said, uses language in a way that relates what is said closely to the context in which it is said. This is described as a ‘restricted code’. Middle-class children on the other hand are accustomed to use language in a way that makes use of very general, abstract ideas. From infancy they are familiarised with universal meanings. Their language, it is claimed, is a relatively context-free ‘elaborated code’.

A clear exposition and critique of Bernstein’s ideas is contained in Harold Rosen’s pamphlet. Some of the faults of Bernstein’s analysis are obvious to anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the labour movement, where working-class traditions are developed subtly in shop-floor negotiations for example, or eloquently at the factory gate.

Workers have a control over language, argument, abstract ideas, superior to those in many a senior common room, which is used every day as a tool of the class struggle. One suspects that socio-linguists choose as their middle-class examples their own and their colleagues’ highly verbal children, and contrast them with small, poorly-observed groups from the unorganised working class.

The theory of linguistic deprivation is popular, because it places responsibility for children’s failure at school conveniently on their families and class and not on the schools. In America, the theory has been ridiculously extended by people such as Bereiter and Engleman, who have produced structured language programmes for the pre-school children of the ghettos to give them the language necessary for academic study.

Tinker, Tailor ... is a collection of articles from various academic disciplines designed to provide some of the evidence to refute the linguistic deprivation theory. The most useful and interesting article is Labov’s Logic of Non-Standard English, in which he analyses the dialect speech of American blacks and contrasts its logic with the confusing verbosity of much middle-class language. He has some pertinent things to say about the test situation in which a large, would-be friendly, white person isolates a small black child, in an unfamiliar room with a tape-recorder and proceeds to ask ridiculous questions for the purpose of passing judgment on him and probably on his family as well.

The anthropological papers in this book are fascinating. They provide evidence that ‘primitive’ cultures can require the development of linguistic and other intellectual skills as complex as any that are used in industrial societies.

Nell Keddie’s introduction makes some interesting points which are obscured by the fact that she writes in one of the most restricted linguistic codes in use today – sociological jargon – in which long words are used to escape from the need for thinking out what you want to say and saying it clearly. She provides a lovely illustration of Labov’s criticisms of middle-class language.

For teachers, this book is too much of a hotch-potch to be really useful. Rosen’s pamphlet however is essential reading.

 
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