English Education February 1992 [antikvár]

Children's Place in the Language Arts Curriculum: Victims, Beneficiaries, and Critics Anne Haas Dyson Me and my mommy and dad live in different houses. My daddy used to live with my mommy and me and my brother and my cousin. My daddy goes different places and different stores and my mommy goes to different stores. So dictated Lamar in the kindergarten, as he adapted to a new family arrangement. In this new arrangement, he was, he understood, loved by both parents. And he lived with both, moving from one's house to the other's, depending upon the day of the week, and thus had his life organized in different ways. The place of the child in current literature on language arts education, particularly the child deemed "at risk" of not succeeding in school, seems similar to that of Lamar in his divided households. In the most recent incarnations of longstanding disagreements, everyone, of course, has "the good of the child" at heart, but they organize the child's life in very different ways. These households have been commonly called, not "mom" and "dad," but "process" and "skills," and then there is great uncle "heritage," concerned mainly with older children but always with a guiding word for the younger ones too (Dixon, 1967; Farrell, 1991). And, while there have been important changes in their respective households over the years, they represent evolving curricular traditions, although most certainly "skills" has been most pervasive in the schools (Goodlad, 1984). For example, E. D. Hirsch (1987), of the heritage clan, sees children who are not a part of the middle class, American mainstream as most at risk—as potential victims—if the schools fail to transmit the "common knowledge" or "heritage" of the "culturally literate." Similariy a recent variant of the "skills" perspective is the "genre camp" of the elementary and secondary schools (currently most firmly rooted in Australia [Comber, personal communication; Reid, 1989]). Sounding themes similar to their "phonics" relatives, these educators worry that