Dum Pendebat Filius

Michael Reagan has written an amazingly ill-informed and extremely stupid column, which appeared today on David Horowitz’s site. He starts out from a position of misinformation and proceeds to make a complete fool of himself:

The San Bernadino, California, high school district is now discussing the implementation of Ebonics – the street language of young African Americans – to be taught as if it were a foreign language…that is, a real language.

Strikes One and Two, in the first sentence.

“Ebonics,” or African-American Vernacular English (the term used by linguists), is a real language. It has its own rules, grammar, syntax, phonology, etc. (If you’re interested, start with the Wikipedia entry for AAVE.) Michael Reagan thinks it’s nothing but slang and laziness, “the street language of young African-Americans.” This isn’t a matter of opinion; Reagan is simply wrong.

When the latest Ebonics brouhaha hit the headlines a few weeks ago (prompting the usual flood of stupid, ignorant commentary; see the Malkins, among others), it was irritatingly unclear exactly what the San Bernadino school district actually proposed to do with Ebonics. This lack of definite information encouraged people to fill in the blanks with what they considered the worst possible scenario: African-American children being taught, and encouraged, to “talk wrong.”

Read the article that started it all and see if you can figure it out, readers. The article says the school board was thinking of “including Ebonics in the program.” It sounds like the idea would be to give African-Americans what amounts to ESL instruction, in order to get them to a certain level of competence in standard American English. This entails recognizing AAVE and Standard English as separate (although very closely-related) dialects, rather than dismissing AAVE as “incorrect” (nothing but slang mixed with “lazy” grammar). This is what Ebonics programs are for. The goal is for students to end up bilingual (AAVE and standard English).

The thick-skulled Reagan, however, can’t be bothered to figure out what the hell he’s talking about.

This is sheer idiocy, and anybody who would even consider such an outrageous idea has never been to Africa. This Ebonics nonsense will do nothing but hold back black youngsters, keeping them behind such immigrants as the Vietnamese, who are struggling to make their way in a nation whose language they know they must learn to get ahead.

Considering the amount of factual error Reagan managed to cram into his first sentence, it’s pretty funny to see him use the term “sheer idiocy” in the next one.

Reagan seems to have the purpose of Ebonics programs 180 degrees backwards. He thinks they will “hold back black youngsters,” because they will prevent African-American children from learning to speak the high-prestige standard dialect correctly. Earth to Reagan: Acquisition of the standard dialect is the fucking purpose of including Ebonics in the curriculum. The point, again, is not to tell African-American children that the dialect they speak is “wrong” and “sloppy,” but to recognize it as a dialect of English and use it to help them gain full competence in standard English as well.

But Reagan knows it all, because he went to Kenya this one time…

When I read this Ebonics story I recalled driving around in Nairobi, Kenya, just a week or so ago. I saw a billboard advertisement for Sony that read “Da Man and da Music.” I asked a young Kenyan what he thought of that condescending ad and he said, “Oh, we speak the King’s English here. We never speak that way.”

As I traveled around Kenya I learned that in Kenya English is the official language, and certainly not Ebonics – a language Kenyans never heard of.

Straw Man 101. What in the world has the sociolinguistic situation in Kenya got to do with anything?

He goes on to describe an idyllic utopia:

Education is mandatory for all children and is paid for by the government. If the children don’t go to the government schools, they are obliged to go to private schools, and their tuition must be paid by their parents. As a result of this, Kenyans have raised their literacy rate to almost 79 percent because they understand that education is the most important means to lift them and their land out of poverty and into a prosperous future.

The two things that most amazed me during my African safari were, first, seeing the many children walking to school in the uniforms all students must wear, and that all the way up through high school they would have to walk two or three miles to get to their classrooms carrying back packs and books, all with big smiles on their faces.

Second, if you stop to give them a little gift such as a pen, they come up to you and smile and say “thank you.”

Sounds good, yeah? But let’s contrast that situation with our own:

That would not happen in this country. To begin with you’d be afraid to let them walk to school. School children in Kenya are safer than our kids here in the United States, because they don’t put up with pedophiles in that nation.

Their children are also more polite. They understand the importance of education and the importance of learning the English language for business purposes in the future.

A nation of pedophiles who don’t give a damn about the English language, that’s us.

Moreover, every child is multilingual. Each one speaks Swahili, the native language, his tribal language, and English – and sometimes a foreign tongue as well.

Interesting, but not remarkable. English-speakers tend to be monoglot, because it’s pretty unusual for most of us to encounter someone who doesn’t speak our native language (or at least enough of it to get by). Most of us will go our entire lives with no need whatsoever for even a few phrases of any language but English.

According to the Ethnologue, there are 61 languages spoken in Kenya, a nation twice the size of Nevada. For many people, some degree of competence in a second or third language is necessary just to go to the market in a neighboring village. If you’re lucky enough to go to school, instruction probably won’t be in your native language, but will be in Swahili and/or English (the nation’s official languages) instead. Kenyans tend to be multilingual simply because they have to. Those of us who grow up speaking English in English-speaking countries don’t have to learn a second or third language unless we want to. These are simple sociolinguistic realities.

This is a digression, though. Reagan seems to be implying that Kenyans learn several languages because they care about education, as opposed to America, where we want to teach children Ebonics because we don’t care about education.

When I visited a Masai village in a remote area I learned that these pastoral people who raise cows have a keen understanding of the importance of education, so much so that in their tiny villages where the buildings are all made from cow dung – they are happy about it because Jesse Jackson isn’t there to tell them they shouldn’t live in houses made of cow dung – they all have one-room schoolhouses.

They have built them just outside their villages and the kids go to school every day. I visited one of these schools where the students were aged 4-8, and I was amazed to see that just as in my school days they had the ABCs posted on the wall along with a chart listing all the numbers from 1-to-100. Every one of those children could count to 100, knew the English alphabet, and were learning English and arithmetic. I could not help but think how many American public schools could not boast of such a record of accomplishment at this age.

Aside from the pointless, silly crack at Jesse Jackson (I guess he just couldn’t resist), this is a nice story, but somehow, he thinks that the Masai’s desire to learn is attributable to Kenyans’ lack of interest in African-American Vernacular English.

Why would San Bernardino consider doing such a great disservice to its black community? It is sure to hurt their black students by not teaching them how to speak the proper English they need to get by.

Again, 180 degrees flat-out wrong. The point is exactly what he seems to think it’s not: to teach African-Americans to speak and write the high-prestige dialect (Standard English). What he says he wants is exactly what proponents of Ebonics programs say they want. He’s just too fucking stupid and ignorant to see that.

It’s interesting that if real Africans get it, why can’t African-Americans get it? I think the answer is that the American educrat establishment doesn’t want them to.

Mike Reagan is the one who doesn’t get it here. He could not be more wrong about this subject if he wanted to.

Now, the actual value and efficacy of Ebonics programs is a whole different subject. Reasonable people can disagree about whether they’re a good thing or not. But before you can pontificate about Ebonics “being taught in schools,” first you have to learn what it is.