Typing Out Loud

Education is never neutral. It is never neutral because our philosophers, from Jefferson to Dewey to Giroux, have always connected it to our ability to perpetuate and participate in a democratic society. Our pedagogies, therefore - or how we go about educating - are necessarily embedded with ideologies that are attached to our definitions of participation and our capacity to participate in that society. The value or meaning of participation coupled with our ability to participate is what determines, in any given era, notions of literacy.

In December 1996, the Oakland School Board approved a resolution that recognized Ebonics as the primary language of African American students. In response to this, Senator Raymond Haynes introduced California Senate Bill 205 calling for the dismantling of the California Standard English Proficiency (SEP) program, and banning any recognition of or reference to Ebonics and other vernaculars in the process of teaching Standard English (SE). (The bill was defeated in committee in April 1997.) Both events occurred against a backdrop of public outrage against a pedagogy, endorsed by the Linguistic Society of America, that took account of current vernacular to teach English to a population stigmatized by the larger society for their nonstandard use of dialect (see John R. Rickford’s commentaries). Literacy, when not defined from above, is at root, cultural competencies - tools that allow one to maneuver successfully within one’s own culture. Like Ebonics. Seen from outside of the culture, these tools are judged irrelevant.

Allan Bloom comes from another culture and another class altogether. At the end of The Closing of the American Mind, he writes:

After reading of the Symposium a serious student came with deep melancholy and said it was impossible to image that magic. Athenian atmosphere reproduced, in which friendly men, educated, lively, on a footing of equality, civilized but natural, came together and told wonderful stories about the meaning of their longing. But such experiences are always accessible. Actually, this playful discussion took place in the midst of a terrible war that Athens was destined to lose, and Aristophanes and Socrates at least could foresee that this meant the decline of Greek civilization. But they were not given to culture despair, and in these terrible political circumstances, their abandon to the joy of nature proved the viability of what is best in man, independent of accidents, of circumstance. We feel ourselves too dependent on history and culture (my emphasis).

Bloom’s is not a world of contingencies. He speaks the language of a dominant culture, and participates in it through a fierce dedication to a “life-of-the-mind” - constructing an ideology of thought around an immutable and a-historical canon of self-perpetuating literature. There is no place in his world for relativism or multiculturalism, for these are seen as distractions from true Socratic reasoning and self-examination.

How do we reconcile the world of Ebonics and Bloom’s Western canon, and what are the implications of their coexistence to our understanding of literacy?