ABSTRACT
This study demonstrates the abundance of the Kindergartner's use of language. Not only was their language use prolific but it also revealed the children's ability to discriminate between various forms and functions of speech, choosing, creating, and adapting those aspects that would serve many purposes. As the children worked and communicated with their peers, they displayed an adept usage of language that made the very notion of language deficits appear to be a preposterous presumption on the part of schools. It raises questions about why teachers and administrators continue to promote the theory that Indian and minority children have language deficits. These conclusions about shortcomings often are based on culturally biased tests, Anglo notions of book knowledge, and the ability to label things according to how a teacher (who is typically Anglo or Anglo influenced) does so. Expecting exact answers rather than accepting the variety of rich ways that children speak about their world is limiting at best and racially biased at worst. Accusing Indian children of having extreme language deficits permits schools to create themselves as having preferred status and thereby gives rationale to subordinate Indians to a lower rank, those who cannot speak as intelligently or with as much embellishment as the dominant class. This supposed differentiation of language use leads to differentiation of schooling experience. The most extensive and the loftiest type of education is available to those who are expected to do the best; those who know how to speak, how to act, and how to learn (all according to mainstream values) while the “minimum competency” education causes curriculum for Indian and other minority children to remain at the level of basic literacy and computational skills (Oakes 1986). With few exceptions, these children are the ones assigned to carry on the serviceable jobs in our economy. Differentiation in their education disallows a giant leap toward the higher end. In meeting after meeting I attend at school, the most pervasive pleas from teachers and administrators are the constant call for learning phonics, decoding words off of “word walls” (the latest addition to rote learning, thought to be a progressive innovation), and learning arithmetic. Concern for increasing vocabulary through reading good literature or understanding mathematical concepts is rarely (if ever) expressed. These educational goals are reserved for those who already know how to speak, how to elucidate their phonetic sounds, and how to add and subtract. The conspiracy that Indian children suffer from language deficits may be unintentional. Most teachers of young Indian children are thoroughly inculcated into the belief and surety that their charges lack an extensive language base that is inferior to that of white children. This is the consistent explanation given for the children's failure to progress. Thus the reasoning behind the language-deficit theory was originally, and still is, the preservation of the ascendancy of the governing class. The hegemonic assault on Indians continues today through the retention of language-deficit theory, cultural deficits and their direct result, and differentiation of schools, which, in turn, leads to differentiation of privileges. The only means to break through this barrier is to bring equality of curriculum to minority children so that the playing field might be counterweighted.
