School English and Public Policy

IN THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH IN AMERICAN SCHOOLS, many traditions have converged. The ideals and methods of teaching Latin have been imposed; methods for improving the speech of socially ambitious adults have set standards of correctness; and a kind of discourse used in academic writings has influenced our conception of literacy. The converging of these traditions can be seen in the reports of school reformers of the 1890s who, faced with a rapidly expanding secondary school system and increasing numbers of high school and college graduates, intended that the teaching of all subjects, from the primary through the graduate school, should be articulated in order that high school and college degrees would certify a recognized standard of achievement. Although twentieth-century reformers have slightly modified traditions set in the 1890s, those traditions, supported by an ideology of upward mobility through perseverance in school, have never been rejected. In this essay I present detailed information about school English, a functional variety that has influenced twentieth-century American vernaculars and the writings of most Americans. Because its persistence cannot be understood outside its institutional and social context, I will set it in its nineteenth-century context and comment on some of the factors that have favored its survival. Finally, I shall comment briefly on the recent Black case in Ann Arbor, in which the quasi-legal status of school English was an important issue.