Reading Min-Zhan Lu’s story about the education in school versus her education at home I felt conflicted the way she was. I could not believe her ability to switch back and forth between the language of the school and New China, and the language her parents were teaching her at home. I cannot imagine the confusion she experienced when she realized the same word (such as “red”) meant something totally different depending on if she was at home or at school.
We have discussed a lot about dialects and first languages versus second in class so far. However, we never discussed a different mindset depending on someone’s location. Her parents wanted her to be “cultured” but her teachers wanted her to learn the “language of the Working class”. There was such a difference between the two languages that Min-Zhan Lu wasn’t sure how to separate the languages depending on where she was. How can someone go from the color red representing revolution in school, and the “Commies” at home? She was never able to share examples with the class of outside reading she was doing because no one else would have understood the references. No one else would have read Jane Austen or Nathaniel Hawthorne because the themes and viewpoints would not match with those of New China. I am amazed she was able to keep the conflicting viewpoints so separate. However, it saddens me that in order to keep her thought processes and languages straight she refrained from participating in school and sharing her original book report on The Revolutionary Family with her parents. She was forced to sort out the different languages every time she wrote a book report for school.
I admire Min-Zhan Lu’s perseverance when it came to using both languages. However, I wish she did not blame herself for being unable to separate such opposing forces easily the way her teachers and parents wanted her to. When she received a Chinese-English dictionary in high school and found the definition of “class” to be completely different from the context in which she understood it, she saw even more the opposition between the two educations she was receiving. She also saw how different the same language (English) could be, depending on her location. Her parents did not want the “Red Doctrines” to corrupt her, but in school she was taught the language of revolution and looked down on for having an “Imperialist Lackey” for a father.
Do we have anything similar to that in present-day America? Maybe not to that effect. If a family has strict views about certain social issues but sends the children to a public school, the children will potentially be exposed to all different types of viewpoints. Maybe this could be similar. What are everyone’s thoughts? Do we have situations in America today where there is a potential for a different “language” between home and school? I do not mean speaking Spanish or Russian at home and English in school. I mean learning a different type of the same language based on beliefs. Do you guys think we have anything this severe today?
I’d say that behavior in school versus at home can have separate meanings. I work with under-resourced youth and I see a lot of students that have two sets of behaviors–one for school and one for home–that are based on the ideologies of these different communities.
One particular event that stands out to me is physical violence–I’ve had to break up a lot of fights and in the aftermath of an altercation, I hear the same thing all the time to explain the fight–“he/she hit me first” nearly always followed by “my mom/dad said that if someone ever hit you, you hit them back”.
To me, it’s shocking that the role models for a lot of these students are encouraging this type of eye for an eye reaction, but it’s been explained to me that it’s not necessarily about violence, but about self respect–students who lack external status want to protect their reputation and self importance as much as possible, an idea that’s commonly held and promoted throughout lower income communities. While it’s a generalization, and could be quite far from reality, it does in some way make sense.
This isn’t to say that all children from low-income environments are inherently more prone to violence or more likely to act out or physically harm others, but conflict resolution is more often seen as a way to assert one’s value than to come to a beneficial truce for both sides when a person’s individual worth is at stake. It’s not about being violent per se, but of matching or besting what’s been done to someone. If someone punches you, when you punch back with equal or greater force, you’ve retained or upped your status, in the same way that if someone insults you, you say something mean in return.
A lot of teachers respond to this attitude by setting up a difference for the student–you can act that way at home, but at school you need to find a better way to solve a problem with someone than getting into a fist fight. In a way, it’s defeatist–educators accept the fact that they can’t affect the home environment and need to draw distinctions between school and home, and the public life versus personal.
It makes it difficult to integrate more positive behavior patterns into a student’s life because both are supported by different sponsors. It becomes especially problematic when a student engages in both violent and nonviolent behaviors in the environments that allow them. It’s hard to fault a student for violent behavior when they receive mixed feedback about it. Can it be completely wrong to hit someone when people accept or possibly praise you for it or it is seen as justifiable in your community?