Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Disadvantage: The Environmental Case 83[cultural deprivation] is a euphemism for saying that working-classand ethnic groups have cultures which are at least dissonant with, ifnot inferior to, the ‘‘mainstream’’ culture of the society at large.In their studies of American Indian life, Wax and Wax (1971: 129130)reported that official evaluations routinely emphasized presumeddeficiencies: the home was described as having ‘no books, no magazines,radio, television, newspapers it’s empty! ...the Indian child has such ameager experience’.The researchers aptly referred to this as a ‘vacuum ideology’, one inwhich the implied remedy is not so much upon replacing inappropriateskills, attitudes and values as it is upon filling a void. Their concludingparagraph is worth citing here, since it represents well the criticismsmade of cultural deprivation (note that, for ‘Indian child’, we could alsoread ‘black child’, ‘immigrant child’, ‘lower-class child’, etc.):If the Indian child appears as ‘‘culturally deprived’’, it is not becausehe is lacking in experience or culture, but because the educationalagencies are unwilling to recognize the alienness of his culture andthe realities of his social world. It is not that the child is deprived ofculture, it is that the culture which is associated with his parents isderogated because they are impoverished and powerless. (Wax &Wax, 1971: 138)If we combine the perspectives of educationalists like Keddie andanthropologists like Wax and Wax, it is easy to understand Persell’s(1981) view that cultural-deprivation theories can be just as racist ashereditarian ones. As part of his argument that deficit philosophies areexercises in ‘blaming the victim’, Ryan (1971) thus noted that it would bemore accurate to see schools as ‘culturally depriving’ institutions than tosee children as ‘culturally deprived’. Consequently, Ryan (1971: 61)argued that ‘the task to be accomplished is not to revise, amend andrepair deficient children, but to alter and transform the atmosphere andoperations of the schools to which we commit these children’.The ‘difference’ view of disadvantage claims that, to the extent towhich lower-class society does not resemble that of the middle class, itsmembers will be on a less than equal footing. Since it is assumed thatthere are no substantial or important intergroup variations in basiccognitive ability, any differences simply reflect varying adaptations toenvironments, most particularly in terms of early socialization. Inherentin the difference position is a respect for social diversity: cultural and