Standards for Children

               Discrimination is something that’s very prominent today, even with the many attempts to improve people’s openness to new ideas and new people. Language discrimination and prejudice is something that many don’t talk about. It’s not as popularly spoken about even though it’s just as important as many of the other forms of discrimination out there. What is language discrimination someone might ask, it’s the idea that a person’s language, dialect, or accent, makes them lesser or inferior to others as well as them being judge for it. They’re seen differently and treated differently because of the way that they use their language, in this case English specifically. In America there are plenty of examples of this such thing happening, it’s very prominent in minority groups and or immigrants. Basically, anyone who its attempting to learn English and or people who use English differently than its preferred usage. It stems from the idea that standard English is the only English that we should be speaking and any other is obsolete and at certain points have no value in our society. This concept that language determines your worth, your value, what you mean to the world is what ingrains the idea of inferiority and superiority with language in the mind of a children. At an early age we can look at this and think that this is how it’s supposed to be, this is what we’re supposed to think when it’s not. Children are very intelligent and can pick up on many things and when you give them an idea like this it can influence how they see language for a long time afterwards. These negative connotations that children have about their languages as well as how the standard for English gets pushed onto them, makes them have to think that maybe they’re the ones doing something wrong. This forceful use of standardized English creates a negative implication with a child’s own language and or their way of speaking. How and why is this happening, and what can we do to fix this problem?

Firstly, I want to speak on standardized English. What is it? It’s the way that schools teach English. There is a standard that we are required to meet and if we do not do so then the way that we speak gets invalidated. It’s a policing on how the English language should be used and if you aren’t capable of being able to meet that criteria you are looked down upon. It basically implies that there’s something wrong with how you speak, that the way you speak its worth being listened to unless you can speak up to standard with the rest of people. The idea of this standard is shown through many forms of media and the education system. They push it on to kids, like putting them in reading groups and putting letters on their reading level whether they’re above a certain level or below that level. Its degrading for a kid to be told that they’re behind or under the ideal English level, whether it be because they aren’t very fluent in English or they just have a different way of using the language at home.

Media is one thing that plays a big role on the way language is portrayed to children. In Wordstruck by Walt Wolfram a sociologist and a retired journalist, speaks about language bias plus language discrimination, how media and others are impacting how children see the world of language and why it’s important to teach children that these differences are ok. He explains “Even in Disney animation reinforce stereotypes-main characters speak in Standard American or Britain dialects and mean or ignorant animals tend to speak African- American English or Southern English” (Wolfram,2013, 28). There are big media companies, like Disney, out there. Ones that are shown to millions of children around the world expressing that standard if you speak the standard, you’re good, equating it to be a superhero and or the good guy and anything that doesn’t line up with it as someone bad. Which makes the language bias very apparent. An example that could have been used to further prove that would be the movie Aladdin. Aladdin takes place somewhere in the middle east, or that’s at least what can be assumed and rather than all of them having an accented English it seems that only the bad guy has an apparent accent. With that in mind you can see that there’s something that’s being pushed. As a child it’s not something you see or pay attention to, but it is there, its hiddenly implemented in the cartoon to push such an idea onto them later. Considering there are many people in America who are of all different ethnic backgrounds its destructive towards them to put things out such as that. Not only the media but sometimes even in school teachers can put this standard into kids’ heads.    

Schools are another place where children are exposed to language ideas and discrimination. Teachers create the narrative that this standard is better and see children differently if they don’t easily conform to it. Sahra Ahmed who is a teacher herself, speaks on teachers and how they see people who aren’t fluent with English as different as well as why we shouldn’t treat them as such, in fact change the way the system is running. In “IMPLICIT BIAS TRAINING FOR CLASSROOM TEACHERS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNER STUDENT” she states that “During my own teaching career, most of the teachers I encountered viewed ELL students mainly in deficit terms. They emphasized what ELL students cannot do, rather than what they can do, and equated their ELL status with a disability” (Ahmed, 1). Be using the word disability its evident that they’re seen as something that needs extra help. It’s used in a negative sense implying that there’s some sort of problem that unfixable. Which just shows how standard English, the way it gets pushed, makes others perceive those people who aren’t up to standard as different, like there’s something wrong with you. Children can see how they’re treated, and base their views on that, being treated as a burden is what creates the idea that they’re a problem to others. That somehow the way they speak makes them different from the others in a negative way. 

Walt Wolfram further shows how children internalize their views of language differences. He cites a telling experiment conducted by a woman named Marilyn S. Rosenthal. The experiment was for children, what they did was have two boxes. One box named Steve spoke standard English, the other was named Kenneth and it spoke African America English. They played the same message to the children and then the interviewer asked, which box has nicer presents. Once that was asked some of the kids stated that they would rather take from Steve one even said that Steve was good, and Kenneth was bad. The experiment was conducted by a woman named Marilyn S. Rosenthal. This experiment showed how children even at a young age can have biases and can see how these different usages of English are seen in a negative light. They understand that standard is good and anything besides that implies something negative about the person using it. Through this experiment its obvious that there is some sort of bias that can be ingrained into children’s minds. Relating back to an earlier paragraph Wolfram talks on how there’s ideas placed on the way people speak implying whether they’re good or evil and this is it at work. The children are being shown at a young age these ideas and are sucking them up like a sponge. Taking this knowledge and applying it to everyday life. Showing that the standard is over everything, and that difference isn’t ok. I found this TEDx Talk and the speaker was Anthony Peterson, someone who has a degree in religion and psychology, in this talk speaks on race issues and on how race isn’t real, but it’s an important part of a person. He speaks a little on his grandson and how even for being 5 years old he was starting to learn how to identify people by race. Its not specifically on language but you can see how children at a young age are capable of grasping ideas about certain topics. He begins to discuss by saying “I said, “Elliot, what color is my skin? Without even looking at me he said, “it’s black.” Then I said, “What color is your skin?” There was a long pause.  And then he said “Grey?” If we pay attention, we can catch our children in mid indoctrination”(Peterson, 4:05-4:35). His grandchild while still being a young kid was able to understand race. He’s learned from the things around him that people are identified by different factors of who they are physically. He can distinguish that his grandfather is different from him because of his darker skin even if he’s not yet able to identify what his own is. To relate this back to my point on language you can see here that their out external factors that are influencing his way of seeing the world. This is what goes on in the minds of all children as they start to develop and grow, they learn these different ideas. They learn from what they hear, what people like teachers, strangers, even family members say and do. That’s where the standard comes in and puts pressure on these children to meet a certain standard, in this case English. Many children just like him are out there whether they’re just learning English for the first time or only speak it. This standard is what makes them see others differently for who they. The way someone speaks has no hold over how intelligent a person could be or if they are superior to another. They both relate by showing how kids at a young age can already understand these concepts that they see around themselves, family and others. They can see how society treats and shows these types of people who are different.

Jacquelynne S. Eccles an educational psychologist talks about children, how during the growing process they begin to learn, where they belong in the world, who they’ll become, and how others effect how that child sees the world. In her Journal Article The Future of Children she talks about how eventually a child must leave parental vision which allows them the freedom to see new ideas and experience different people.  “In the middle-childhood years, children spend less time under the supervision of their parents and come increasingly under the influence of teachers and activity leaders such as Sunday school teachers, coaches of little league sports, instructors of dance… In contrast with the intimacy and familiarity that characterize family relationships, participation in school and formal programs exposes children to different religious and ethnic groups, as well as diverse personal styles” (Eccles, 1999, 34). Kids learn from outside sources, it could be literally anyone. They can be shown at a young age what others believe and take that as the truth rather than an opinion. Through others they gain their ideas, their values, what’s right and what’s wrong. Those same people can create false ideas in a child’s mind, in this case about language. When this standard of English gets pushed onto children, they start to look at how they speak, and think is this wrong. What’s wrong with me and why am I like this. Which leads into how it effects a child’s perception of what’s right and wrong about someone’s language and how they speak.

There are plenty of examples of how standard English being implemented into the lives of nonnative English speakers creates those negative ideas. Amy Tan a linguist and writer speaks about her experience with a parent who didn’t speak standard English and in turn was treated much differently than one would if they spoke proper English, which is in her narrative in Mother Tongue. She spoke in that narrative about how the treatment of her mom made her see her different because of the way she spoke “I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, because she expressed then imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect” (Tan, line 9-10). She sees her mother’s English in a negative light, being a child the way she thought was influenced by how her mother was treated by others in society. She thought that because her mom wasn’t speaking the way that she was supposed to base on the language standard that her words meant nothing. Others pushed the idea into her head like workers in stores, banks, and so on dismissing her mother because they thought of her as unintelligent and not worth the time based on her usage of the English language. As a child she was easily influenced into that mindset about her own mother, making her even think that her moms speak was something to be looked down upon. Gloria Anzaldua an activist; teacher, and writer also speaks on her experience in her personal narrative “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”where she explains her life as a multilingual individual (speaking bother Spanish and English) and what that’s taught her about her language and how she should treat it. In a part of her narrative she goes on to talk about her experience with a teacher and how she was spoke down to because she was correcting that teacher on the pronunciation of her name. Her teacher brutally told her “If you want to be American. Speak ‘American.’ If you don’t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong.” (Anzaldúa, 1987, 34) Immediately its evident that the use of other language besides English isn’t appreciated in the classroom and in fact its insistent that it should be thrown away for English.  It shows that the ignorance of that teacher, and the way something like that can affect a child’s way of thinking. The use of alienation by the teacher is something that would inter make a child want to fit in more, forcing out whatever love she possibly had for her language. When you treat a child differently from other based on a simple principle like language devalues their language as well as their words. From their narratives it’s obvious that the way people are treated as a young age effects how they become in the future, and because they were treated poorly and or someone around them was treated poorly because of the way they spoke they took that, and it created their view on language. This happens to many people not only them, there’s a huge struggle out there for those who speak multiple languages having to be treated poorly if they don’t use a proper form of English. It impacts them negatively, but eventually they learn that they can’t let this hold them down from their language identity. It takes time to get these ideas out of a child’s head and make them something positive within themselves about their language.

Through the negative ideas that are push onto kids about language because of forceful implementation of standard English, many children might create bad connotations with anything other than the standard. I feel that the best we can do to start changing this type of discrimination is go to schools and teach that its ok to be different, its ok to speak differently. Whether that’s considered broken or not what you say is still important. I feel like it’s the schools’ job to implement a system where these children can learn these ideas because school is one of the first places where this idea of standard English is pushed and it’s a place children spend a majority of their life in. What they should do rather than separate children into groups, they could have them all together and explain what these differences are rather than stigmatizing the children who don’t follow the standard. There are schools out there that are attempting to help fix the problem, some of these teachers see it as helpful for the children’s understanding of these difference. Wolfram quotes a teacher that was helping implement this program and what she said was “to understand language is not only to know how to speak and write ‘standard English; correctly, but also to value the rich tapestry of language in all its forms” (Wolfram, 30). She feels it’s not only important to speak English but to look at the other versions and at least not alienating them from the standard. Its important to see the other differences out there in the language rather than just sticking to one specific one because its others are just as important. They are just as interesting, creative, and meaningful. It means a lot to them, their culture, represents where they come from. You shouldn’t strip them away from that, As Anzaldúa said “until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (Anzaldúa, 39).

Citations:

Ahmed, Sahra. IMPLICIT BIAS TRAINING FOR CLASSROOM TEACHERS OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNER STUDENTS. The Ohio State University, 9AD, http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/implicit-bias-training-for-english-language-learners/.

Anzaldua, Gloria. How to Tame a Wild Tongue. Borderlands/La Frontera, 1987.

Eccles, Jacquelynne S. Eccles S. The Development of Children Ages 6 to 14. Princeton University, Feb. 1999, https://www-jstor-org.ccny-proxy1.libr.ccny.cuny.edu/stable/1602703?seq=4#metadata_info_tab_contents.

“What I Am Learning from My White Grandchildren — Truths about Race | Anthony Peterson | TEDxAntioch.” What I Am Learning from My White Grandchildren — Truths about Race | Anthony Peterson | TEDxAntioch, TEDx Talks, 4 Nov. 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5GCetbP7Fg.

Tan, Amy. Mother Tongue. The Threepenny Review, 1990.

Wolfram, Walt. “Sound Effects: Challenging Language Prejudice in the Classroom.” Teaching Tolerance, 2013, www.tolerance.org/magazine/spring-2013/sound-effects.