Teaching of Language Speaks to Bigger Issues

One of the many ways that language is political is the way that discussion of it points to larger societal issues. This is especially true when discussing the teaching of language and the attitudes involved in how language and writing are taught.

Any strong opinion of how language should be used and taught leads to arguments about the social characteristics involved. For example, in Heather MacDonald’s essay “Writing Down Together,” she argues that “anti-authoritarian and liberationist” views, which “reflected the political culture of the time,” responded to issues of language, writing, and race in a way that “celebrated inarticulateness.” Her primary example is the “movement to legitimate black English.” Even in this short paragraph, an array of social and political issues are addressed.

First, the article alludes to the larger issue of how communication styles of minority groups are seen in different lights. Some people believe that these communicative systems are legitimate and acceptable. Others, like MacDonald, believe the exact opposite. But either view clearly acknowledges the way that societies are stratified in ways that establish a “standard” and minority variants.

But the larger issue is how strict standardization--and the teaching thereof-- “should” be. This is political in the way that it involves identification of social standards and ways that larger ruling entities make the decisions of how language should be used and taught. And further, this opens discussion into how authoritative leadership figures should be. MacDonald argues that the leaders and teachers of the time she wrote the article were “liberationists” in that they believed less in strict teaching and direction and more in guidance and encouragement of expression of ideas. She, obviously, falls on the other end of this spectrum.

All of these issues are important in the way that they apply to both language and other issues. Concerns with social class, race, teaching/leadership styles, and even parenting techniques are concepts that can be applied on personal scales all the way up to large structural organizations, and in a conversation centered in discussion about language, it is concepts such as these that are unavoidably linked and pulled in to these same types of conversations.