A matter of social class bias
By Dr. Winford James
August 07, 2005
Posted: September 20, 2005
Since education is the major passport to socioeconomic opportunity for the masses everywhere in the world, but especially in the Caribbean, I am extremely concerned that, perennially, thousands of our young people are low performers or non-performers in the school system. My concern is rooted in three observations primarily: 1) they are (as a result) cut off from the higher and better stations of living, 2) too many of them take out their frustration violently on more comfortable society, and 3) they perform well in any number of non-school tasks. If they perform as well as they obviously do on non-school tasks, why is it that they perform so poorly in the school system?
The standard view is that they are duncy or that they are not cut out for the staple things that schools do. Since schools are biased towards promoting linguistic, mathematical, and scientific intelligences as well as the process of memorization (despite what research keeps telling us about the versatile and variegated nature of brain and mind!), it must be, according to this view, that our hapless youngsters are weak in these intelligences and this process. Which is to say that they have great difficulty: a) expressing information and message explicitly, consistently, and elegantly in the standard styles of English; b) thinking abstractly, elaborating propositions and arguments in an orderly and rational fashion, and making long-distance connections between ideas; and c) storing what is already known neatly and easily recoverably in their minds.
But how can this be when simple, unconscious observation tells us that i) they are fluent, mature speakers of their language of daily interaction; ii) they are clever, clear-minded, and calculating in an informal street sense; iii) they perform many complex tasks involving orderly sequences of steps; and iv) they keep in memory whatever they are really interested in?
Have we not heard teenagers effortlessly using their vernacular to persuade, mamaguy, exhort, describe, caution, narrate? Do we not witness them efficiently planning march pasts, fundraisers, beauty pageants, inter-house competitions, limes and get-togethers, and, unfortunately, felonies of various sorts? Don't we know youngsters who can somehow pull apart electrical subsystems in our motorcars and put them back together, but who don't know spit about writing an argumentative paragraph or doing simultaneous equations? Don't we know children who can easily reel of the names of rappers, the titles of the latter's songs, and even the lyrics, word for word?
These children are duncy?
I beg to differ. If you take a moment and look at the bigger social context in which they live and have their being, you will see that literally thousands of the youngsters who perform badly in the CXC CSEC and CAPE exams not only come from the poorer and less socially privileged families, but also come up in these families with knowledge, ideas, and understandings that are mostly not valued, and, in fact, are even despised, in the school system. Yes, they go to school with very critical linguistic, mathematical, and scientific knowledge, but that knowledge is routinely treated as if it is corrupt, contaminated, and useless.
So that there are wide lacunae between school and thousands of homes, and our youngsters routinely are either unable or unwilling to bridge them, especially if their teachers, caught up in the sinister agenda of catering preferentially to the children of the better, privileged homes, label them as duncy and don't take the trouble to help them cross over. They can't or are unwilling because they lack the styles of language that school values, having hardly socialized in them. They can't or are unwilling because the kinds of knowledge that school promotes are qualitatively different from those that they are habituated in. They can't or are unwilling because they don't get the respect of the school system for their personhood.
It is largely a matter of social bias, and it is a big shame that many teachers who themselves came out of similar backgrounds have brainwashed themselves into not seeing the difference between background and intelligence, between social style and educational style, between authentic social realities and curriculum preferences.
We desperately need enlightened policy to redress the balance.
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