Fact or Flak: Reality behind the Ebonics Debacle

Language is a complicated issue. It's complicated because every human uses language. And because they use language, they believe themselves to all be experts on language. This is not the case. So please, abandon your preconceptions. For those of you unable to abandon your preconceptions, i will use short sentences and small words.

There are children. These children speak a dialect of english. This dialect of english is not the Standard American English (SAE) that is tested for by the SAT, ACT, GRE, or No Child Left Behind. If you were feeling generous, the current way of teaching children SAE might be called "sink or swim." These children only see SAE on television. They grow up in one of the many different cultures that make up the "American Melting Pot". They are brought to school, and expected to behave in a manner they are not familiar with, with minimal instruction.

One school board, decided that this was silly. Wouldn't it make more sense to first understand how their children really speak, and then explain how SAE works by connecting how they actually speak to how SAE works?

In fact, this is a proven methodology! Children of recent immigrants are taught with a good deal of success when you introduce English to them via their own language, rather than in spite of it. So this school board decided, "hey, this could work for us too, why don't we see whether we can qualify for the same funding as children who are learning english as a second language?"

Unfortunately, America did not understand. They though that by acknowledging that children of a particular subculture did not speak Standard American English (although, y'know, really, a lot of people don't. Guess what, you still understand them), that they were being asked to legitimize a dialect of English which is unpopular. They criticized this school board, so much, that all funding opportunities disappeared.

Ironically, thanks to the ignorance of others, children are still told to sink or swim. Through no fault of their own, because the way they speak is considered "ignorant" and "improper", they are not taught SAE effectively.

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On Issues of Culture:

People often decry African American Vernacular English (the linguistic name for "ebonics") as simply being "improper" Standard American English. They often believe that people speak AAVE due to a lack of education. This is a misconception. Children essentially language sponges. From before they're born, up until puberty, childhood brains just soak up language. They soak up whatever language is around them. That's why british children speak with a british accent, and children from Georgia speak with a drawl and a twang. Likewise children who are born to parents who speak AAVE soak up AAVE. They do not speak AAVE because they have improperly soaked up Standard American English. They speak AAVE because that is what they know.

Next. AAVE is not an illegitimate way of speaking. AAVE is a dialect of English. It is like other dialects of english, for example British English, Appalachian, Bostonian or Brooklyn English. It is a way of communicating. Manners of communication are often associated with certain ways of behaving. The way you speak to your boss or the way you would speak to the president is different from the way you speak to your close friends, or to your significant other. In fact this is so universally the case, that people stereotype it. For instance, academics are often accused of being pedantic, or arrogant. That's because they occasionally speak in a way that is difficult to understand for people who are not familiar with the subject at hand. It is only arrogant if they refuse to explain the unclear points, or dismiss those who don't understand, because they are uninitiated.

Likewise, people who demand, and expect children who speak AAVE to suddenly flip a switch and begin speaking SAE are in a similar situation. They are dismissing AAVE speakers out of hand, without giving them a chance to become acclimated to SAE.

Currently Plugged Into: The Cyberiad

An excerpt from: The First Sally (A) or Trurl's Electronic Bard of the Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, translated by Michael Kandel (yes, this is a -translation-, i can only imagine what the original was like).

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"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling you understand, in the cybernetic spirit."

"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your sense?" Trurl began, but stopped for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gental gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but know such a^2 cosine(2*phi)!

This concluded the poetic competition, since Klapaucius suddenly had to leave, saying he would return shortly with more topics for the machine; but he never did, afraid that in so doing, he might give Trurl more cause to boast.

What i really want out of the Sheehan conflict

Unless you've been living in under a rock or deep space, you've heard about Cindy Sheehan and the controversy that's exploded around her.

Bush continues to decline to meet with her, citing the fact that he's aware of what she has to say. And he's right. Iraq policy isn't going to change. The US didn't go into Iraq with a plan, and it's going to be difficult to spin one out of the situtation that's developed now (unless we'd like to just hand Iraq to Iran).

So why should Bush meet with Sheehan?

Simple. To prove he's not an unrelenting bastard. A simple acknowledgement of the fact that things aren't going perfectly. To prove that he can communicate with Americans in a way that does not solely involve propagandistic motives.

Recent developments in the History of Science, a breif recap.

It is my opinion that the cultural beating evolution has taken at the hand of in the past 30 years is symptomatic of a larger anti-scientific and anti-technological trend that has evolved out of disparate corners of American society.

First some historical perspective. Back around the turn of the previous century, there was a movement called Logical Positivism. During the high times of Modernism, philosophers and scientists pursued goals like the formalization of all mathematics. The problem, as demonstrated by Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorems in the case of the Principia Mathematica, was that the Positivists were reaching for things that were in principle impossible. Regardless of the philosophical turmoil brewing the demands of WWII and post-war reconstruction made science and technology as the driving force in human civilization.

The problem was that Positivism's demise left a gaping void, with nothing to fill it (hard to accomplish the impossible). Postmodernist philosophy instead lead to attempts to reenvision reality, and included in that science and philosophy. Of these, the most influential was probably Thomas Kuhn's theory in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Disregarding other theories for the moment, Kuhn's basic insight was that scientific progress did not work solely via altruistic scientists who steadfastly developed theories by following where facts lead. Obviously, a serious furor developed. Scientists did not appreciate the accusation that scientific truth was merely a social construct, true only because we believed it to be so.

Disregarding Kuhn however is impossible. Kuhn was right in part. Science was and is a human endeavor. Humans aren't perfect, and as the adage "there are three kinds of lies -- lies, damned lies, and statistics" points out, research can be twisted for all sorts of purposes. Nor are the goals of research programs necessarily determined by scientists, as DARPA is well aware (Yes, of course a missile defense shield is possible!). Anyway, with the departure of the modernist dream, Kuhn drove the nails into its coffin by removing scientists from the seat of impartiality and neutral pursuit of Truth (note capital T).

That brings us up to modern day philosophically. What i've written thus far sounds pretty bleak, but science has made due. But remember, modern day scientists, don't claim to be perfect. However, a lack of perfection doesn't mean that scientists can't be, and don't strive to be, impartial. Because of this point Scientists don't tend to buy Kuhn. Most scientists fall into the philosophical tradition of Karl Popper, who's solution to the problems of verificationism was something called Falsificationism (where you test theories by trying to make them break).

So what's this got to do with anything? Kuhn opened the door to a new kind of relativism, relativism over the fundamental facts of science. Operations such as the Discovery Institute, and other efforts to undermine science, such as global warming deniers function by exploiting this belief that scientific conclusions are determined merely by what people believe.

Unfortunately the position of science today is more dire than just what i've described above. The present day first world is closely associated with all things technological. As such, technology and science bear the wrath of individuals in our society who are dissatisfied with society. Whether they are anti-evolution literal biblical creationists, anti-authoritarian hippies and/or libertarians, anti-urban sprawl ruralites, anti-pollution environmentalists, or those opposed to processed food, many view the failures of society as the result of forms of technological domination.

As a result, science is facing not only acute attacks by groups with particular agendas, but also a general malaise of distrust from the general public.

Later i'll post some on perspectives of science, and what i think needs to be done to rehabilitate the science of cool.

Categories i plan on using

Hello, to the non-existant audience who may be reading this (or for future readers).

I intend on using a couple recurring categories to track things that i find interesting or irritating, the list currently includes but is not limited to:

• We do not live in a free society. (And other complaints about authoritarianism)
  
• Fact or Flak? (Don't believe everything you see on TV)
  
• Remember kids, details are important! (because reality doesn't work in soundbite sized chunks)
• Currently plugged into... (media showcase!)
• For future reference. (Recordings for posterity)
  

Kin Selection

ZOMG!!!11ONEONE11!!! First Post!