“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”: A Counter-Argument

Dedication

I learned to teach English at a Historically Black College in Alabama under the guidance of no-nonsense African American women. Studying “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” a resolution affirming the legitimacy of dialect from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), when it first appeared in the early 1970s, my mentors saw beneficent intent but blatant shortcoming. Betty Gates, my most inspirational colleague, said, and I am quoting exactly, “With friends like these, black children hardly need enemies.”

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language” remains the official position statement of the guild of college compositionists on dialect difference, lionized to this day as a first principle of “liberatory” English teaching. My mentors would be sorely disappointed to learn this. It is in respectful memory of these excellent English teachers—Betty Gates and Emma Cleveland in particular—that I offer