ABSTRACT
The ‘quotation’ in the title is wishful thinking. It expresses what I and every other contributor to this volume would hope that schools might at least aspire to achieve. Instead, as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas’ writing and presentations have powerfully articulated, schools frequently inculcate shame among culturally diverse students, constrict their identities and their minds, and leave them spiritually numb rather than vibrant. This reality emerges clearly from the study carried out by Mary Poplin and Joseph Weeres in four multicultural urban schools in southern California, termed Voices from the Inside: A Report on Schooling from Inside the Classroom (1992). Among the 24,000 pages of interview transcriptions, essays, drawings, journal entries, and notes that formed the data for this study was a poignant observation by one of the students: ‘This place hurts my spirit.’ Poplin and Weeres reported that the schools exhibited ‘a pervasive sense of despair’ largely as a result of the problematic relationships that were the norm in these schools:
Clearly, schools do not have to be like this. Yet, these kinds of relationships, however well-intentioned on the part of educators, tend to be the norm rather than the exception when the language or language variety that students bring to school is constructed as a problem to be resolved or fixed. We see too few examples, at least in North America, of schools that have taken as their starting point the conviction that linguistically diverse students have the right to maintain and develop their mother tongue within the context of the school and that their cultural identities are worthy of respect and nurturing. We also
see too few schools that take as their starting point the conviction that the languages and cultures that students bring to school are resources for other students, teachers, and the society as a whole (Ruiz, 1988). Although the major reason for this is the prevalence of coercive relations of power in most spheres of human endeavor, the lack of knowledge of documented alternatives also contributes to the perpetuation of destructive forms of schooling.
