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Originally Posted by noumenal

We can't have several different versions of English that are acceptable in the business or academic world or anywhere that precision is important.

So it's not necessarily racism. Should we have different SATs for different English dialects?

see, why not? simply politics...

i think you live in new orleans so you're aware of the french/cajun/creole distinction. they are different languages, yet european french teachers think cajun is "bad french" and creole gibberish. "ebonics" has evolved over an african substratum so naturally is different, just as english is different from german, etc. (there are differences of degree but this i hope illustrates my point). languages evolve and there is a failure of the educational system to recognize this-- this failure marginalizes perfectly smart students simply because they speak a different dialect of english.

language is a matter of politics. why aren't the SATs in latin, after all? shouldn't we all speak latin to ensure knowledge is universal? hm, im missing my own point- i guess what i want to say is that there are purely political, not linguistic issues. it's about power and politics. you do your students a favor when you ask them to learn the language of power, so they can transact with it; but you alienate them by dismissing their own language as irrelevant-- do i make sense with this?

i'm not blaming you for this of course. but since you're one of the smartest people here maybe i'm trying to provoke you to reevaluate some assumptions.