Ebonics

It's baaaack. San Bernadino, California is adding an ebonics curriculum to help motivate troubled yoots. The problem:

• This isn't educating. You aren't teaching kids what they need to know, you are teaching them what they might be able to pass.
• The leading cause of poor achievement is the parents, not anything the schools can do.

Now the "urban" English dialect isn't that bad. You can usually tell who grew up in the city, but you can also tell who grew up in the South too. It isn't a problem since we're all engineers and our college careers have left us with only a passing acquaintanceship with good grammer anyway. The problem is that youze can't write no technical reports likes that when youze representin' yo' work.

But hey maybe they don't think those kids will be working behind a desk anyway. That certainly isn't the career path they're training them for.

UPDATE: Kim du Toit is weighing in and his comments section is full of good stuff. To sum it all up, Ebonics (or African American Variant English, AAVE) education is a great way to train kids to be the next generation of food service workers, garbage collectors, and bums.