I recenlty found myself accused of being “racist and classist” for insisting that all students should be taught the rules of grammar and spelling. The exchange reminded me of the far too many white instructors (including faculty and adjuncts) who have said to me, with great pride, that they chose not to hold the same standards for their Black and brown students as they did for the white ones because, somethingsomething privilege. This led me to always remind my own students, “Don’t bother with people who lower their standards for you: you won’t learn a damn thing from them.”
I’m also reminded of a Somewhat Famous White Leftist and Educator who proudly spoke of the time he insisted, to a Chicago Public Schools Principal, that CPS students shouldn’t be learning Shakespeare but simply be encouraged to do more—excuse me while I vomit—Spoken Word. This person has only ever attended private institutions from kindergarten onwards, and his children are all graduates of the very exclusive and expensive Lab School here in Hyde Park. If their teachers had voted to stop teaching Shakespeare or grammar, he would have been among the first to storm into the principal’s office and demand that the curriculum be changed back.
I once attended a City Hall meeting where people celebrated the creation of a new trade school-focused public school, targeted towards Black and Latina/o students. Supporters’ eyes brimmed with tears at the thought that, at last, “our children would have a place that trained them for the world.”
When you tell lower income students of any colour that they shouldn’t have to worry their little heads about silly things like grammar, and send them out into the world unprepared to write well or to hold their own in discussions of literature and art, you are exercising the eugenecist logic that they are inherently incapable of little more than keeping the world running for much wealthier and often white people (I won’t go into all the complications regarding Asians, who are not as uniformly classed as some might think).
Education should be designed to teach everyone to access worlds of information and expertise in everything that is both “useful,” like computer science, and “useless,” like art and literature. In an ideal world, you should be able to debate the value of that Žižek essay with your car mechanic, without hesitation on either side. Your mechanic should also make to be able to take a summer off while someone else takes over his clients. But as long as people think that they’re doing poorer and often POC students a favour by not holding them to the same standards as their (often) white and higher class classmates, we will always be mired not just in a system of inequality but in a system of thinking that replicates that inequality for generations to come.
I’ve written about this often, but here are just a couple of my pieces on the subject and some related matters:
“On Blackness In The Arts.”
“We Were There, We Are Here, Where Are We? Notes Toward a Study of Queer Theory in the Neoliberal University.”
Image: Édouard Manet, The Fifer, 1866.
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