Friday pm I went to a seminar given by Jamaican teacher trainers and
curriculum developers. Currently they teach reading of standard colonial
english through a principally phonics approach whilst the kids come in
with Jamaican Creole which has a different phoneme structure. Apparently
the kids are "proficient in Creole". They wonder why they have "literacy
problems". Hereabouts we teach bilingually. Welsh phonemes match Welsh
orthography making it a sensible approach. The politics of imperialism
live long.
This is an issue of politics and associated self-confidence, the economics
of schooling in a "social democratic" capitalist Europe. There has been a
500 year political struggle in Wales for language rights which have only
had a legal basis for 25 years. In our local area welsh does present a
threat to the monoglot English community and we can see a backlash, but in
the global scheme of things, Welsh and Welsh speakers to not pose a threat
to English speakers in Great Britain (compare anti-english sentiment in
English speaking Ireland). It is however a political issue and a site of
resistance in a very orthodox political sense.
The treatment of Urdu in England and Spanish in the US presents whole new
vistas of political struggle (I might ask Renee >> "how is your daughter's
Galego coming on?").However I imagine that the school which Renee's
daughter goes to does not have a regular stream of people for whom
Castiliano is not the expected language of tuition..... nevertheless
generating a site of conflict and resistance for those who mediate the
world through different cultural systems..
I am not sure of Eugene's concerns for the concept of "resistance".
Resistance is in the eye of the beholder. Wills's lads were active in
their own construction of a school counter culture, and this culture
defined its own meanings of success , failure, happiness etc. It is
because external values run counter to their systems definitions that we
choose to describe it as different. Being a resistor does not necessarily
make you a "good" person. Making a living by crime is a form of
resistance... but that does not fit with the proper noun of the French
"resistance" . Nevertheless cultures of criminality are oppositional to a
prevailing hegemony. The lads were well beyond the school's laws. So yes
they were Resistance and yes they were Dissidents, but not the same type
as the "heroic type".
I need to think some more about cheating. A critique of the examination
system and the values it supports ?... or is the "greed" for success a
demonstration of extreme compliance with the system that demands success
in the "screening" by whatever means possible? Quite different from the
case presented by Willis.
All in all I think Bill's developing analysis sound.
back to work...
Martin
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