Professor Honey

In reading the arguments over literacy between the left and the right, I had the opportunity of reading Professor John Honey's book: Language is Power: The Story of Standard English and its Enemies (1997) again. In this book Professor Honey takes on those, like Brian Street and James Gee who advocate a tolerance and appreciation of literacy in all of its forms and shows that the way people use language has been hard fought over as a means to dominate society. From this perspective, standard English is not simply a neutral and benign way to communicate across cultures, but a hard fought sign of domination by one class and culture over others. Those who control the literacy curriculum ensures social reproduction through success at school and other institutions that privilege those who already have begun to master these forms of literacy and language-use before they come to school. In finding favour in one form of literacy over another others lose out. Professor Honey says:

"We know that the particular values which dominate our educational systems, which have to do with cultivation of the mind by reading, by trained methods of thinking and observing, etc., are not in fact found interesting by a significant proportion of people in out society. They may defer to those interests in other people but do not desire them for themselves, indeed they may feel the symbols of educatedness to be threatening" (1997:234)

"Are Footballers who do not make the first team, but only play for the second or third, robbed of their human worth?"