Ebonics to keep kids interested...

[gauchecritic]

I don't think it likely that 'ebonics' plays any large part in why these children don't go to school.

If this were actually the case then very few of my classmates that were inclined to 'skive' would have attended at all. With very few exceptions we all spoke broad Yorkshire and some had to concentrate to understand any other kind of accent. You would then expect that the 'skivers' would avoid classes where the teacher 'talked posh'. This wasn't the case. Their absence was indiscriminate. School just wasn't interesting.

A desire to learn is a lot more important, in my view.

If you are able to 'get along' in your community and peer group then of what use is schooling?

If a friend of a friend needs you to unload trucks in the middle of the night and pays you cash in hand, why would schooling be of any concern?

I don't claim that feeling stupid or embarrassed are not concerns for some, but there seems to be a whole lot more emphasis being put on this than is probably needful.

Try offering money instead of certificates then see how interesting school becomes.

 

[R. Richard]

In my experience the very poorest groups of people in the USA are those who normally use two or more languages. They are mostly immigrants who are not really assimulating and the "second" [often a first] language has no economic benefit. In fact, the second language is often not really a language; veryu frequently it is a dialect that is pretty much incomprehesible to anyone who does not live in the immediate area.

If a person, particularly a young male, lives in an area in which Ebonics is used, then that person uses Ebonics as a necessary qualification for survival. Unfortunately, the habitual use of Ebonics tends to produce unemployables.

The other item I would like to bring up is the study of a "foreign language" by the educated. I was force to study "german" in college. One day a student came to class with a for-real German newspaper. He could not read the newspaper. The instructor, who was a native-born German speaker, laughed and threw the book we were using on her desk and said, "This is not German. It is what some college professor thought was German 30 years ago. If you do not use a language regularly with native speakers, you very quickly are no longer able to really use the language.

 

[Remec]

But then I suppose they'd have to be middle class to do any of those things anyway. I must be crazy to think that they 'read' anything other than comic books.

<raising hand>
Um, except for some independent titles targeted at the niche audience within certain parts of this country, if you can't read Standard English (well, American, I suppose, to be technical), then you'll not be able to read a comic book.

You could follow the flow of action and have a basic grasp of what might be going on from the emotions and reactions drawn on the faces of the various characters, but you'd not get the entirety of what was going on and would miss out on much of the allusions, iimagery, and poetic prose that fills many of today's titles.