Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Disadvantage: The Genetic Case 69Finally here, early 20th-century assessments of feeble-mindedness andgeneral incompetence also implicated language: a study by Goodenough(1926: 393), for example, concluded that ‘the use of a foreign language inthe home is one of the chief factors in producing mental retardation’.Similarly, Smith (1939) concluded, on the basis of her work with childrenin Hawaii, that attempts to use two languages hindered development. Inhis classic Languages in Contact, Weinreich (1953) summarized a history ofsuch misinformation, presenting a long list of disorders associated withbilingualism: moral depravity, stuttering, left-handedness, idleness andexcessive materialism are among the more bizarre items on the list. AndFlores (2005) has recently summarized the matter for the Mexican-American population, a large and important constituency both thenand now.Contemporary manifestationsThe ultimate excesses of the biological view became evident duringthe Second World War and these, together with other genocides of the20th century, have made assumptions of innate inferiority rather lessacceptable. Or so it might seem. There continue, for example, to besupporters of eugenic interventions, some of them quite notable. In 1970,William Shockley, a Nobel Prize winner in physics and the founder of‘Silicon Valley’, argued that such measures might be useful in counteringthe alleged decline in American intelligence. He was very much caughtup in Jensenist assertions that intelligence could be accurately ascertainedand that certain steps might follow; see below. At one point,Shockley suggested financial compensation for black Americans willingto undergo sterilization (see Shurkin, 2006).Much more commonly, however, we find that public disapproval hasdone little more than to drive racist assumptions underground, to maketheir expression less overt. In some important work, Jones and hiscolleagues (Jones & Sigall, 1971; Sigall & Page, 1971) led people to thinkthat their attitudes could be accurately measured by machine. When theywere asked to verbally express the opinions that they now believed werealso being electronically monitored, some depressingly familiar perceptionswere revealed. Indeed, there was a partial re-emergence ofprejudices that had been expressed openly in attitude studies of the1920s and 1930s, prejudices that had become socially unacceptable sincethen. The general argument made by the researchers was that ‘sociallydesirable’ responses disappear or become attenuated in settings where