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Language, History, and the History of Education
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
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- Copyright © 1984 by History of Education Society
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1. By “language per se“ I mean either or both halves of the famous Saussurean distinction: langue, the tacit system or “structure” of linguistic signs; and parole, explicit verbal performance. See de Saussure, Ferdinand, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Baskin, Wade (New York, 1966), pp. 7–15.Google Scholar
2. Sennett, Richard, Authority (New York, 1980), p. 169.Google Scholar
3. Recent empirical studies of language use, notably those conducted by William Labove and cited by Finegan (150–154), appear to demonstrate the existence of certain tacit but widely shared norms of usage. Even when their habitual practice does not match these norms, speakers have been found to approximate them when placed in a more or less formal speech situation. These findings suggest, somewhat ironically for the descriptivist position, an element of prescriptivism as a (descriptive) fact of usage.Google Scholar
4. The distinction between the two types of authority has been clarified for me by Starr, Paul, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York, 1982), 13–14. Starr uses the terms “social” and “cultural” (authority) as opposed to “political” and “intellectual.” Google Scholar
5. In an epilogue which is longer than all but two of the book's eight chapters, Finegan not only advances the Foucaultian hypothesis, but also belatedly acknowledges that “traditional grammarians” (whose ranks include not only cranks and curmudgeons but distinguished writers, editors, and critics) have a legitimate claim to professional competence in the area of usage. Moreover, their particular competence extends over written usage, and it develops in this epilogue far more explicitly than in the body of the study, that the two sides have often been talking past each other in this regard: “grammarians” addressing themselves primarily to standard written English, “linguists” concerned first and foremost with speech.Google Scholar
6. Foucault, Michel, “The Discourse on Language,” appendix to The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Sheridan Smith, A. M. (New York, 1972), p. 227.Google Scholar
7. For another treatment of Progressive trends in the teaching of English over these years, but one focused on literature rather than language, see Applebee, Arthur N., Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English: A History (Urbana, Ill, 1974), pp. 110–125.Google Scholar
8. Lyman, Rollo Laverne, English Grammar in American Schools Before 1850 (Chicago, 1922), pp. 5–10; Applebee, , Teaching of English, pp. 5–14, 33–38.Google Scholar
9. In general, the book is long on the details of various reform proposals, short on analysis and interconnections. Reformers' “world views” remain “implicit” or are left out of the picture altogether. In certain cases the treatment is inferior to that found in already published accounts: I think of the lively portrayal of “Federal English” in Kerber, Linda, Federalists in Dissent (Ithaca, 1970), or the one in Krapp, George Phillip, The English Language in America, vol. 1 (New York, 1925), pp. 4–12. Throughout, Baron makes scant use of secondary works on American history and no use of the rich historiography and social scientific literature of reform.Google Scholar
10. These facts about simplified spelling derive partly from Baron's account, and partly from my own research on the subject.Google Scholar
11. Baron alludes to the French movement, but provides no details. The information, again, comes from my own research.Google Scholar
12. Another possibility would be to discuss the episode in terms of Progressivism, although as Daniel Rodgers has recently argued, the idea of a Progressive “movement” as a cluster of reform impulses at least loosely unified in objectives and style, has become increasingly problematic of late. Rodgers, , “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History, 10 (December 1982):113–32.Google Scholar
13. Chomsky, , “Phonology and Reading,” in Levin, Harry and Williams, Joanna P. (eds.), Basic Studies on Reading (New York, 1970), pp. 3–18.Google Scholar
14. Struever, , “The Study of Language and the Study of History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (Winter 1974):401–15; Skinner, , “Language and Social Change,” in Michaels, Leonard and Ricks, Christopher, eds., The State of the Language (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 562–578.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
15. Struever, , “Study of Language:” 401.Google Scholar
16. For an application of the Foucaultian notion of “discourse” (albeit one critical of Foucault himself) to the tasks of American intellectual history, see Hollinger, David A., “Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals,” in Higham, John and Conkin, Paul (eds.), New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979), pp. 42–63.Google Scholar
17. Attention to what I have been calling “forms” of language is most popularly associated with the name of Marshall McLuhan. The most sophisticated work in this area, however, has been done by Walter, J. Ong, S.J. See especially his Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, 1977).Google Scholar
18. Skinner, , 567, recommends attention to “appraisive vocabulary” as a constitutive element of social reality and a factor in social change. Raymond Williams has pioneered this type of approach, and in fact Skinner's piece is largely a review of Williams' work. Struever, , 404–409, endorses the same general tack, but also sees rich possibilities in the notion of elaborated and restricted “codes,” as developed by the socio linguist Basil Bernstein, and the Chomskean concept of the deep structure of language as a key to historical understanding of the “genesis of ideas and actions.” Google Scholar
19. One development within the field of history which points in this direction is the work of Fernand Braudel and the Annales school. For what is language if not a “structure of everyday life,” even if Braudel has not yet included it in his inventory of eating and drink-habits, agricultural practices, and other forms of “elementary basic activity which went on everywhere and the volume of which is truly fantastic”? The Structures of Everyday Life , vol. 1 of Civilization and Capitalism: 15th–18th Century, Reynolds, Sian, trans. (New York, 1981), p. 23. Braudel and his followers may well be evolving the research techniques, not to mention the patience with glacially-changing phenomena, needed to bring language “per se“ within the scope of historical investigation.Google Scholar
20. Postman, Neil, Teaching as a Conserving Activity (New York, 1979), p. 50.Google Scholar
21. Weber, , Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernizaton of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, Calif., 1976). See also, Paul Vogt, W., “Schooling and the Colonizing of the French Countryside,” History of Education Quarterly, 18 (Winter 1978):453–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
22. Two works which touch on the problem in suggestive ways are Bledstein, Burton, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976), especially ch. 2, and Gouldner, Alvin, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York, 1979). Gouldner, a sociologist, makes an especially provocative series of suggestions on the role of the schools, the universities in particular, in creating what he calls the “culture of critical discourse,” perhpas the main weapon in the social arsenal of the “new class.” In addition, there has been a steady increase of interest in the role of the schools vis-a-vis more basic kinds of literacies, of which Pattison, Robert, On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer to the Age of Rock (New York, 1982), provides the most recent example.Google Scholar
23. Watson, , The English Grammar Schools to 1660: their Curriculum and Practice (Cambridge, 1908), pp. 4–8. Watson has been confirmed in this perception by his successor Kennth Charlton, who writes in Education in Renaissance England (London, 1965), p. xii, that “the problem of communication and its solution by the use of the vernacular and the printing press constitute, perhaps, the most important aspect” of the educational history of the period. The notion of an educational revolution in the early modern period stems most decisively from Stone, Lawrence, “The Educational Revolution in England,” Past and Present, 28 (1964):41–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
24. Postman, , Teaching as a Conserving Activity, p. 47, 50. Postman does not advocate revolution, however, but rather a qualified defense of traditional educational arrangements.Google Scholar
25. Foremost among these implications is that the newer electronic media are much less confined to language for content: images, (non-speech) sounds, and mathematically processed data are transmitted as well, and with a facility which may bode for language a reduced, or at any rate an altered place in social discourse— and consequently within education.Google Scholar
26. Seeley, , “English in Schools,” Macmillan's, 17 (1867):76.Google Scholar