Recommended Reading
We are attending a parents evening for our daughter (let’s call her Renata) and it is becoming worrying how each successive teacher laments if only our daughter would “Speak up a little more in class. She is a confident girl but very quiet.”
Miffed we walk home querying each other is she really that quiet? Well if she is then who is to blame? Easy, of course it us, her parents. So as parents when she has gone to bed we starts discussing this problem of Renata’s language, or lack of it in class.
This is a child who luckily has no learning or speech difficulties. We try to think back on where we might have gone wrong. “Remember how demanding she used to be for those bedtime stories.” We recalled at about three she was already hungry for the strict rules that these bedtime stories must have a beginning, middle and an end.
What we didn’t know - this would come later when I started some research into language - that there is a growing consensus in Western thought and science that we may understand ourselves and our world more deeply if we think in terms of patterns of relationships rather than of reified essences or entities. This pattern dependency seems strictly human for nothing like this obsession with extracting hidden patterns is seen in other animals.
Interestingly this pattern-hunger isn’t limited to speech, people who cannot speak hunt down patterns in sign language. So perhaps we were guilty for inculcating her with this fixation for extracting hidden patterns.
In the language arena...maybe, it is just a simple matter of confidence.
Then you do a little research and you find that this ability to speak up is a little more nuanced that the touchy feely concept of confidence. For those who ‘speak up’ must feel they have the authority to do so and those who listen must feel the addresser has the power to make them listen.
You see we thought, as parents, we could bring our objectivity to language because it had an invariant core.
But the problem with this assumption is that language does not have an invariant core, its only core, if you can call it that, is difference and difference is not a thing, it is not substantive. But no one will tell the powers that be in education that the snag with difference it cannot be reified, it is relational and therefore it does not exist in space or time.
Language is a process which arises out of an awareness of differences and such differences themselves mainly arise within a larger classificatory context, through unconscious processes pre-formed by linguistic categories, rather than through conscious processes performing rational procedures.
Through innumerable acts of correction, the educational system tend to produce the need for its own services as teachers consecrate legitimate language and conserve their monopoly in their labour of correction. As parents we had never given a thought to the fact that the teachers were paid to teach codified language with authority for they were codified by grammarians, and their task is to encourage equivalences in a system of grammatical norms not to teach the evolutionary fact that we are the word made wo/man.
