by Janae Katz
What is standard English, and how should it be taught, if it should be taught at all? Many folks have been debating this question for a while now, and for good reason. The inevitable truth about America’s society is that it is full of subtle prejudices and filled with premade boxes for people to go in. We start off life with elementary school or daycare, where we are told to be ourselves, be creative, and we learn our basic skills. Then we continue to late elementary school and middle school, where the boxes start to form, and everything gets stricter. Finally, in highschool, you’re expected to have “realistic life goals,” which is really code for “that’ll never work,” and we are taught strict rules and formulas to follow.
Specifically, though, one thing that becomes almost formulaic and loses most of its creative potential is writing. Creative writing is taught less and less, and even creative written forms such as poetry quickly phase out in highschool and a little in middle school as well. In fact, one specific memory of mine is from eighth grade in middle school, where we had a bookmark that had an exact formula of how to write paragraphs for our papers, so all of the papers would be virtually identical. This leads me into my interpretation of standard English, what it really means or stands for, and the implications of it.
I define standard English as what many call “proper” English, or speaking the “correct” way, but the problem with this comes with the fact that this caters to the white, and usually affluent as well, people. So when we press children to only conduct themselves in a certain way and limit how they can, or “should,” speak in a professional setting, such as school, we sort of continue to push prejudice in the long run and really suppress creativity in the process of it. At the end of the day, teachers are doing what they can and what they are told to do, however this doesn’t have to be the end of the story. In an article by Stanley Fish, he writes about how he believes colleges should teach more about writing rather than focusing so heavily on reading. Afterall, reading American Literature won’t make you good at writing by default. To that, I agree. Schools focus, at least in English class, too much on reading rather than writing. If their goal is to teach students sentence structures and the rules on how to use words efficiently within papers, then they’re going to have to take down the reading bit.
It is ironic that these English classes focus so heavily on literature and reading, yet expect students to partake in the use of “proper/ standard English” within their papers. This sort of teaching tactic makes the writing all formulaic and non original. It sucks the creativity out of the students. While on the topic of irony, it is an interesting fact about these courses that they introduce creative writings, or writings that aren’t necessarily written how the students are expected to write, such as George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I feel as though these courses read more and more, and write less and less over the years, and it is having the adverse effect that they wish to have. I never thought I would complain about this, but there has even been less class time devoted to poems, as in how to write them, the different kinds, and all of the creativity it unlocks. Looking back on my schooling experience, I didn’t really like the poem unit, but it did get us thinking as a class, way more efficiently than novels do, might I add, and I just think that novels and things are great, just not great enough to take up the entire English curriculum. This formulaic way of writing, enforcing all of these strict grammar rules, and making students read so much in so little time, drains the students. In an article featured in The Atlantic, an author named Andrew Simmons discusses how poetry has become more of an afterthought than something to be studied, how sometimes in a classroom environment things need to be sacrificed to fit within the school year, and poetry is usually the first to go; he also talks about how creative expression is often deemphasized in the favor of expository writing. I think it goes without saying, but I totally agree with him, creativity is being thrown out of the academic window, and pushes students into this box that they’re told their whole life that they’re supposed to go into. This leads me to my next point: is standard English upholding existing prejudices in professional settings?
I strongly believe that standard English, how it is taught to us, is code word for “proper” English. So, what is proper English? Proper English is how white people have traditionally spoken, at its core. I can’t even count the amount of times that I’ve heard someone say slang, speak in a particular tone, or use AAVE, African American Vernacular English, and then been told to “speak properly.” It’s already no secret that there is prejudice in the workforce against black people and many other people of color, but it is especially hard for POC in higher paying professional settings, because, and I may be reaching here, but the very language is built against them. I understand perhaps wanting papers to be written in a particular format, however, this leaks into our day to day language and vocabulary within certain settings, and I argue that it is a bit damaging to society as a whole. Because you only hear people in a certain societal class or high paying job environment speak a certain way, when you hear people outside of those environments speaking in a more relaxed manner and using slang or AAVE, the automatic assumption for most is dimness. We hear certain dialects and assume stupidity, when in reality people just don’t want to walk around speaking as if they’ve just jumped out of a 1990s 600 page novel on the phylogenetic tree for arachnids. This is where we learn to code-switch. Code switching is when you switch how you speak depending on your environment and the folks you are around. For example, some kids may speak a certain way when it is just themselves and their peers and friends, and then when they come home they speak all “proper English” and sound like a completely different person. This also comes back to school and how we were taught.
We are taught to speak a certain way and to fit into these premade boxes while at school, and then we are free to act and speak differently when at home. This is when code-switching begins in people’s lives, and if your parents do not like the way you speak when you’re around your friends, but school usually gets to us first. While code switching may not be a big deal for white children, it is especially hard for black kids and other kids who are people of color. Don’t just take it from me, here’s an excerpt from an article from An Injustice by a woman named Allison Gaines,
“Black children know that they must assimilate, but they must do so because their culture is considered inferior. Like a chameleon, Black people change their behavior as a form of self-defense. It is through demonstrating proficient use of American Standard English that Black people feel welcome in white spaces. It is their way of letting white people know that they understand American Standard English, attempting to counter stereotypes that Black people are intellectually inferior.”
All in all, code switching is harmful and is definitely a burden that no one should have to carry. To this problem, Vershawn Ashanti Young poses a possible solution.
Vershawn Ashanti Young has an article in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies titled Should Writers Use They Own English? where he poses the idea of code meshing as an alternative to code switching. This article was also a direct response to Stanley Fish’s What Should Colleges Teach?, where Fish said this,
“And if students infected with the facile egalitarianism of soft multiculturalism declare, “I have a right to my own language,” reply, “Yes you do, and I am not here to take that language from you; I’m here to teach you another one.” (Who could object to learning a second language?) And then get on with it.”
And then Young responded in his own article with this,
“If he meant everybody should be thrilled to learn another dialect, then wouldnt everybody be learnin everybody’s dialect? Wouldnt we all become multidialectal and pluralingual? And that’s my exact argument, that we all should know everybody’s dialect, at least as many as we can, and be open to the mix of them in oral and written communication.”
And to that, I agree. Considering the fact that we have been forcing black people and other people of color to assimilate to standard/ proper English for their whole lives, how is it okay to then exclude their dialect from all things professional and intellectual? I would understand if some things need to be written in a type of way for a large audience to be able to understand or comprehend, however, I do not think all of English as a subject should be taught in this suffocating manner. Code meshing is introduced as a common ground solution in Young’s article, and is defined as so, “Code meshing blend dialects, international languages, local idioms, chat-room lingo, and the rhetorical styles of various ethnic and cultural groups in both formal and informal speech acts.” Code meshing allows breathing room for people to be individuals, and allows everyone to slowly break out of their premade boxes that we talked about earlier. I’m not sure why, but I feel as though the way we are taught currently really just wants everyone to be the same, instead of having creative people, who are independent and sure of themselves. Code meshing will not only allow people to communicate their ideas clearer, it will also create much needed room for individualism. Plus, if some writings, such as scientific research papers and other things of that nature were written in a more code meshing manner instead of full blown standard English, they would be more user friendly, and more of the public would be educated on the facts of things. All in all, code meshing could be the key to this society’s enlightenment and make everything very user friendly, as it should be, because why are we making everything so complicated?
Now, that’s all great, but how exactly do we do this? I think this should start where it all started. In those elementary school and middle school’s classrooms. I propose that we spend less time reading huge, pointless (most of the time) novels, and learn more about different cultures, especially those within our society. I think we need to spend less time cramming everyone into their nice, neat little boxes and more time letting our differences shine through, and giving everyone more room to be heard and to be creative. As for standard English as we know it, I don’t think it should take up a whole class. I think traditional English classes should focus more on creative stories, how to make basic sentences and how to build them up uniquely, and allow the students to write freely with far less grammar rules than we have now. And then if we must have some lingering form of “standard English,” then I propose that it be in its own class as a “special topics” course, and not take up our whole schooling careers, and please, please, please, we need to lower the amount of novels we read- they are doing nothing, I promise. We shouldn’t just stop reading books, but we should also put focus on the other forms of English out there, especially the creative forms.
In conclusion, I think code meshing is the way to go, and code switching needs to go out of the window right along with our ideas of “proper”/ standard English. English classes need to be heavily reformed if we want to stop the future generations from all being the same person, because I believe that if we taught in a more creative and culture based way, more people would feel hopeful for the future and put more effort into themselves, rather than just settle for random jobs that they don’t want to do because they felt like they weren’t enough because of school.
Works Cited
Fish, Stanley. “What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3.” New York Times, 7 Sept. 2009.
Gaines, Allison. “How Code-Switching Causes More Harm than Good.” Medium, An Injustice!, 29 Oct. 2020, https://aninjusticemag.com/how-code-switching-causes-more-harm-than-good-18ede1a57ba0.
Simmons, Andrew. “Why Teaching Poetry Is so Important.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 8 Apr. 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/why-teaching-poetry-is-so-important/360346/.
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2010, pp. 110–118.