Dr Winford James
trinicenter.com

The contaminated slate, Part II

December 21, 2003
by Dr Winford James


Even though we may not be able to identify them, or may be able to do so imperfectly, beliefs and attitudes underlie everything we do. They underlie how parents treat children, how pastors treat their congregations, how husbands and wives treat one another, how Indos, Afros, French Creoles and all the other ethnic groups treat one another, how we relate to outsiders, and, most relevantly for my purposes, how teachers treat students. Beliefs and attitudes may be recast as theories we have created out of our experience of the world, as well as out a sense of our roles in that experience. In the practice, they may be either socially healthy or unhealthy. The Contaminated Slate is unquestionably a socially unhealthy theory even though, like most theories, its subscribers, proponents, and advocates may not see it that way.

As human beings we are social creatures in that we create knowledge and experience from our interactions with one another and with the environment. That is, we nurture ourselves in multiple, but potential infinite, contexts of socialisation, and the environment, physical and otherwise, also nurtures us. But since there are clear, predictable patterns to our behaviour which stamp us as human beings, despite whatever observable differences there are, there must be something in us that constrains our common behaviours. It seems very clear that our brain comes wired in such a way that we will create experience, and theories of that experience, in constrained ways. In other words, we have a common human nature that is qualitatively and characteristically different from other kinds of nature in the universe.

All of our experiencing bears the stamp of human nature. Indeed, human nature constrains and influences everything we do. It influences how we create cultures, including how we worship, speak, play, dance, and make a living. As church pastors and ministers will tell you, there is good and there is evil in human nature. And I think it is the biblical prophet Jeremiah who pontificated under divine inspiration that the heart of man is desperately and unknowably wicked.

It is a fact of observation that we are capable of diametrically opposed behaviours at one and the same time. We are capable of love and hate, nobility and savagery, forgiveness and murder, forbearance and intolerance, social inclusion and social exclusion, democracy and totalitarianism. But these behaviours do not originate in our environment or nurture (though the latter does significantly shape them!) but in our nature - the way we come cerebrally and biologically wired. There is no such thing as a blank state or tabula rasa mind waiting to be written on only by experience. The mind comes equipped to affect experience in multiple ways, and to be affected subsequently by experience.

I am aware that the theory of the Blank State has millions of adherents, including some of the planet's most certified scholars, but it is manifestly a silly, unfounded theory, as more and more recent research is demonstrating; and if you want to read a solid critique and refutation of it, I invite you to read Steven Pinker's book of the same name. The theory of the Contaminated Slate also has millions of adherents, and it is even sillier.

The child born into any society acquires the culture of that society in proportion to her access to that culture. To speak of proportion of access is to recognize the fact of different social groups, classes, and networks that contribute to the culture in compositional ways. So that our child will acquire the forms and substance of the social network into which she is born and in which she grows up. She will acquire the culture of whatever social network she comes up in. It does not matter whether the network is in Britain, Scandinavia, the Middle East, China, Russia, or the Caribbean.

It cannot be otherwise!

When our child therefore goes to school, in whatever part of the world school is, she of necessity goes already socially constructed in accordance with her part of the culture. But, lo and behold, she encounters another part of the culture which is different in significant ways from hers and in which principals and teachers promote and impose value systems that devalorise the system she enters with. To her confusion and detriment, school tells her that the way she was constructed is wrong, cheap, worthless, contaminated. School puts the theory of the Contaminated Slate to work.

But in what ways is what our child brings to school contaminated, and automatically contaminated to boot? In what ways are her experiences, and her narratives of such experiences, worthless and disposable? In what ways is her language corrupt and broken?

The Contaminated Slate is clearly not a scientific theory (science would blow it clear out of the water), but a moral theory. But, using the factor of language to conveniently pose the question, how is Creole morally inferior to Standard English? Is it morally bad because its grammar does not have auxiliary 'be', or its sound system diphthongs that the Standard English system does? Is it morally bad for us to use the syntactic combination 'noun plus adjective', as in 'Winford strong', instead of the combination 'noun plus 'is' plus adjective', as in 'Winford is strong'? It should be clear that, linguistically, that is, scientifically, there is nothing wrong with the syntax of 'Winford strong'!

Perniciously, the Contaminated Slate is not limited to our child's language, but reaches out to smash her total social experience. So too many teachers transmit knowledge as if the child has no worthwhile knowledge of her own. Too many read passages aloud in the classroom that children should be reading instead. Too many correct when they should be showing alternative ways. Too many do not promote student interpretation of new experience within the framework of existing student understandings and experiences. Too many ignore student interests, preferences, and styles in their 'delivery' of the curriculum. Too many do not see the children's knowledge and experiences as scaffolds for new knowledge and experience, but rather as hindrances and roadblocks to learning and development.

They do not see that their practice is the result of this pernicious theory they have of the child, and even some of them who come to see are trapped by habit and tradition in the reflexes of the theory.

What a shame!

Part I | Part II


Archives / Winford James Homepage / Previous Page

^^ Back to top