Pat’s Polemics

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This is a reply to a thread on the blog Fireside Roundup where education is discussed. A number of posts to the thread used a very broad perspective with which I agreed in principle felt required too much of most people to grasp. I guess that makes me one of those elitists.

This thread leaves me feeling torn. OTOH, if we are trying to reach a wider audience with the notion that discrepanies in educational attainment are due to socio-economic inequalities, we will lose them if we assume on their part the ability to make the connection between the low-performing schools in the poverty-stricken areas of their city and labor policies found in 18th century Brazil. It's just too much of a stretch.

OTOH, it is clear to me that these discrepancies do go back to the colonial foundations of our society. No one who had studied societies around the world would be surprised to find that a group of people, a caste, that had been held in slavery within living memory (my late father-in-law remembered his grandfather, who had been a slave until 1865), was still operating in the society at a disadvantage. No surprise there.

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Just today a gentleman was on Book TV talking about the origins of the terms left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive, etc. Let me add my two cents as to what real conservatism would look like.

The first thing we have to do is step back from self-interest. Keeping things the way they are, i.e. defending the status quo, is often considered the hallmark of conservatism. I disagree; that's just self-interest. Seldom do you see anyone who is getting screwed by the system defend the system. One exception: I remember meeting a fiercely libertarian guy in about 1965 who had emigrated from Lagos, Nigeria. He was very poor, living as a Black man in 60s America, and literally had no place to live. But he rejected government involvement in his life. How did he get by? If he got sick, he begged doctors for care and usually got it, according to him.

We might consider him a true conservative when it comes to a libertarian view - he thought drugs were OK but government medical care was not OK. And he stuck to his guns as far as I knew

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Recently a pretty far right conservative tried to convince me that the Republican Party had done more for the civil rights of ethnic minorities and specificall Blacks than had the Democrats. One must remember to hold one's lower jaw up to one's upper jaw to avoid looking stupid. But it's hard. How do they, the conservatives, have the gall to make such statements?

They cite specific instances where some Republican president or legislative effort did benefit minorities: Nixon pushed affirmative action,

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What a good many people seem to miss when they say that your learning style needs to fit the instructor's teaching style is that they are confirming the authoritarian structure of education. Those who fit in are considered good students, those who don't are considered unintelligent or lazy, and those who force themselves to conform are unhappy.
The whole point of differentiated instruction, learner-centered teaching, multiple intelligences, learning syles, and multiculturalism is to get away from this one-dimensional approach to education. B/c it is a departure from tradition, errors are made, missteps occur, exaggerations abound, and charlatans take advantage. Nevertheless, a core of tough-minded educators continue to believe that more people can learn than just those who fit the mold. It's not faith-based education b/c we have seen students written off who blossomed under different conditions, different instruction. We know it works.
It was only in the mid-90s that Charles Murray's The Bell Curve was extremely popular, at least among conservatives, b/c it posited that certain social groups do not perform well b/c they are congenitally burdened with a low intelligence that is inherited as part of their genetic group. These folks are still around, in force.

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This thread fascinates me (a thread on a Latin listserv). I think back on my 20 years of keeping both a Latin and a Russian program going when all the Russian and most of the Latin programs went away. I even lost Russian for 4 years but brought it back.

Since I was also teaching Spanish all that time, it is obvious that I am not dedicated to one language. What I am dedicated to is providing students with some diversity in languages, even if they are all Indo-European.

To offer something, you have to convince people in a position to influence and make decisions. As Karen says, you don't miss your water until the well runs dry. While I see nothing in the posts I've read so far to object to - the need to do what is required to keep programs going, the need to cultivate parents, administrators, students, colleagues.... I don't want to leave out the teacher's personality; it doesn't necessarily have to be sparkling, but he should have one.

Some people have taken offense at the proselytizing for oral Latin or communicative teaching techniques incl tprs. In no way would I say it is the method that does the trick; it is the teacher's connection to his students and the faculty and community. To say that takes nothing away from my sense that the methods mentioned are more powerful as teaching tools than translation and grammar-based teaching; what I am saying is that a grammar-based teacher can be just as powerful in reaching kids and keeping a program. As department chair, I did not hire fl teachers on the basis of their methodology but on the connectedness to kids and their collegiality. People who refuse to work with others short-change themselves and others.

Which brings me to the controversial part of my post:

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Much is made of the obstacle presented by American attitudes toward fl. It is said that if Americans were more like Europeans, learning a fl would be expected of everyone. Well, that’s not so easily done. Just my own experiences tell me that this is a tangled phenomenon.

In my own family, the people on my mom’s side had only German as their model of a fl. My aunt married a man (and then divorced him) whose sisters I remember sitting on the porch speaking German. I think their names were Madie, Elsie, and another. In fact, about the time my aunt was a child, around 1910, German was used as a language of instruction in public schools in parts of the country. WW I crushed that.

But on my dad’s side, everyone spoke Italian. My grandfather came to the U.S. in 1904. My dad spoke only Italian until he started school. He always had a lot of respect for the language and made it clear that he spoke only dialect, not what he called the “legal language”. Yet he treated his dialect (Abruzzese) with great respect. Even in his eighties, he said he’d sit around with his golfing buddies and argue about how to say things, each contributing something from his own dialect. Unfortunately, he taught me only a few words (nu bog for un poco). I was told by Italians at the vendor exhibits at ACTFL that few people speak the dialect any more, everyone having been to school learning standard Italian. I’ll bet that’s an exaggeration.

Two experiences with children of immigrants are instructive.

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So often I think I know about something and then get jerked around and realize I had missed something. Often, this has to do with perspective. For instance....

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This may not really be part of a worldview but since some of the posts in this category match what I want to write, I'll put it under Pat's Worldview.

In looking over the biographical material I've put on this blog, I note that I left out something in my work history. When I entered the field of psychotherapy, it was in a major mental health center. We had the responsibility of caring for the mental health needs of a large catchment area which included the most poverty-stricken part of the city of Phoenix and included both the State Hospital (the "asylum" for AZ) and the County Hospital. Mental patients released from these facilities were referred to us for follow-up care.

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From Joy

Pat:

First off, a quick (re) introduction. I've been a lurker for many years but I seldom post because I think I come off as a bit brusque. This I think is because I've been already 'conversing' with the posts :0) by the time I do put in my two cents. To me it's a logical extension of that conversation but when I see it on the list I cringe because it looks so abrupt.

Wow! This is one of the most provocative posts I've read, and there are some good ones on these lists. By provocative, I mean that it literally provokes in me a massive response.

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