• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1388 0

girl (white) playing video games during the afternoon at an arcade, a pizza dinner, and now cake, ice cream, and presents back at the house. It has run late. Parents have been hanging around waiting for it to be over, and after the last present is opened, it is rapidly coming to a close. In ninety seconds, six of the seven children leave with their parents. Alexander remains upstairs during many of the good-byes. Even so, when his mother yells to him, she is raising her voice only so that her son can hear her, not because she is exasperated or angry. Indeed, although we observed all of the other middle-class parents yell at their children in frustration from time to time, we did not observe similar outbursts in the Williams family. Nor did we ever hear either parent threaten to hit Alex. Rather, they relied exclusively on language as their mechanism of behavioral control.

In addition, issues that would have been sources of difficulty or discipline in other homes did not cause problems among the Williamses. In working-class and poor homes, for instance, the loss of a library book was treated as a major problem. At the end of the school year, Alexander lost a library book. Late at night (after returning home from a trip to the bookstore), Ms. Williams, the field-worker, and Alexander looked for the missing book. Alexander spent much of the search time turning around in circles and even sometimes jumping on his mother’s back. Ms. Williams, saying, “I guess I’m buying that book,” gave up the search after about five minutes. She did not scold Alexander. Similarly, signs of disrespect for adults that were cause for chastisement in other families often evoked laughter from Alexander’s parents. The Williamses were fully committed to a strategy of concerted cultivation. They seemed delighted with Alexander’s overall development and they were unperturbed when he periodically used the skills they taught him to challenge their authority. For them, the benefits of “developing” Alexander outweighed the costs. Across middle-class families generally, the balance between the advantages and disadvantages of an emphasis on language use can be precarious. In the next section, we look at some of the potential drawbacks.

COSTS AND BENEFITS

In a society in which children must attend school, and in which those schools privilege vocabulary, knowledge, and reasoning, middle-class children such as Alexander Williams accrue benefits, even forms of “capital” from the language training they receive in the course of daily life. When Ms. Williams directs her son’s attention to a magazine article, for instance, he learns—and then shares—new information.

On the way to the basketball game, Christina pulled a copy of Time out of the seat pocket. She skimmed through the magazine and ended up on an article that theorized about the extinction of dinosaurs. She exclaimed, “Alexander—look! An article on dinosaurs. You [could] do your report on this.” She passed him the article, and he began to read it. About ten minutes passed and Alex handed the article back. He initiated a conversation about how old the Earth was. He then began to talk about the fact that some dinosaurs are now believed to have been mammals.

Embedded in this kind of casual information gathering and sharing is an important additional dividend. As part of such exchanges, children discover that their own opinions are valued by others, that their ideas are considered interesting and important. Adults tend to listen with care to children as they share information.

Middle-class children also receive grammar instruction in out-of-school hours:

Christina asked him, “What did your teacher say about practice? You know you have not been practicing that much.” Alex: “I know. He told me to practice all of this week. I sounded terrible. Me and Tom had practice together during our homework period.” Christina then corrected Alex as she drove. She was not scolding him, but she was firm: “Tom and I, Alexander.” Alex then repeated what she said, “Tom and I had practice together during our homework period.