Educational Deficit of Modern Children

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Certain children around the United States are labeled as having a language deficit. These children will suffer for the rest of their lives because of the modern school systems rigid rules. The label of having a deficit, given by the school system, can be proven to be not the large deficit it is made out to be, but a simple difference in educational socialization. Because of their diverse educational background the modern school system rejects certain children as having a deficit. A deficit is an insufficiency or inadequacy; in this context this means that some children have an insufficient understanding of the English language. Most of the children who are labeled as having a language deficit actually have a diverse educational culture which causes their schools to regard them as having a deficit.
A lot of the children who are labeled as having a language deficit by the public school system can speak in other contexts. Bedtime stories are a critical part of a child’s educational socialization. The parents in the towns prove this point based on their different methods of reading to and interacting with their children. Heath studied the towns of Maintown, Roadville, and Trackton and their methods of raising their children. All three towns are located in the Carolina Piedmont area; Maintown is upper-class, Roadville is white lower-class, and Trackton is black lower-class. In the mainstream culture, also the culture of Maintown, the town parents read bedtime stories to their children regularly and this custom is given high importance in the parent’s view of childhood. The bedtime stories are not a one-way dialogue based in this method; the parent reads to the child and asks questions pertaining to the book. The child, in turn, answers...

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... vernacular as unintelligent and ignorant of the English language. The problem is not a deficit in children’s learning but a system which is intolerant of anything except the typical learning system of the middle and upper-classes.

Works Cited

Heath, Shirley
1982 What no bedtime story means: Narrative skills at home and school. Language in
Society. Vol. 11, No. 1. Pp 49-76. Cambridge University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4167291 Labov, William
1972 Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence. Atlantic Monthly, June.
Motoko, Rich
2013 Language-Gap Study Bolsters a Push for Pre-K. The New York Times, October 21. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/us/language-gap-study-bolsters-a-push-for-pre- k.html?_r=0Lucero, Lisa J.
Schwartzman, Helen
1984 Child’s Play. Imaginative Play: Deficit or Difference? Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates Inc.

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