#heyemmareads

[About linguistic pluralism in the classroom] All we can do is provide students with the exposure to an alternate form, and allow them the opportunity to practice that form in contexts that are nonthreatening, have real purpose, and are intrinsically enjoyable.

If teachers hope to avoid negatively stereotyping the language patterns of their students, it is important that they be encouraged to interact with, and willingly learn from, knowledgeable members of their students' cultural groups.

To provide schooling for everyone's children that reflects liberal, middle-class values and aspirations is to ensure the maintenance of the status quo, to ensure that power, the culture of power, remains in the hands of those who already have it.

[Delpit's sense of dread] is the result of coming face-to-face with the teachers, the psychologists, the school administrators who look at 'other people's children' and see damaged and dangerous caricatures of the vulnerable and impressionable beings before them. But we cannot blame the schools alone. We live in a society that nurtures and and maintains stereotypes.

[Jane Elliot speaking] I hope [my students] know now and for all time that just because someone says something is true, just because society acts as though a fact were established doesn’t make it so. I want them to think, to reason, to question."

The problem is majority group reaction to differentness. As long as members of the majority group see differences as negative and respond in negative ways to those who possess them, the problem of racism and sexism and ageism will persist."

She had the sophistication to distinguish between prejudice and discrimination, to recognize that prejudice is more often the result than the cause of discrimination, and that, odious as it may be, prejudice is by far the less injurious of the two. Prejudices, she saw, serve mostly to restrict he lives of the people who hold them, narrowing their vision and shrinking their worlds. Discrimination, on the other hand, cripples the lives of others- often millions of them."