Ebonics
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If people did not know about the attempts being made in American school systems to reach out to a multicultural population before 1996, they certainly found out about it then. When the public school system in Oakland, California, decided to treat the standard speech of black Americans as a separate language or dialect, the issue of multicultural education (which had been discussed and agreed upon and argued over at the local level for at least a decade) became an important part of the national dialogue. Ebonics became a symbol for nearly everyone who thought that something should be changed about the way American schoolchildren are taught, with some people applauding the idea and many others -- and not only conservative whites -- decrying it. An examination of this issue will serve as an introduction to the topic of multicultural education in the United States.It is important to begin the discussion of Ebonics by noting that the storm that settled itself so quickly over the Oakland school board had very little to do with the actual linguistic issues at hand. Ebonics, stripped of its political rhetoric (to the extent that is possible with such a subject) was really just an acknowledgement of the fact that Black Americans, caricatured for years as being unable to speak proper English, were instead simply speaking a separate dialect of English. This dialect, Ebonics, was influenced in part by West African languages, in part by the speech patterns of the Southern United
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nsonÆs poems. But schools for many people, including many parents and school administrators, are also institutions for shaping future workers and citizens. All the emphasis on not being tardy, on perfect attendance, on observing hierarchies is often explicitly justified on the grounds that at some point children will go off to work and the good responsible habits they learned in school will help them climb their professional ladders.
And if it is the case the schools are not simply where children are taught their times tables and the periodic chart of elements but also what it means to be an American, the importance of multicultural education becomes much greater. Schools in some real measure have the power to make pupils more homogeneous, to push them firmly down the road to assimilation and the great melting pot or to push them with equal firmness away from assimilation. Whether high school children in Oakland study Ebonics as a separate dialect has little real consequence for the fate of the nation (although it may well affect individual students in important ways). But whether those students grow up to be Americans who happen also to be black or African-Americans has a very great effect on society as a whole.
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2931
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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