When I was young, the public school taught speech and diction classes designed to make us not sound Southern. It was explained to us that this was important to our future because a Southern accent would be assumed to be proof of low intelligence as well as ignorance and a commitment to racism. They worked quite hard on training it out of us. I suppose it worked.
I suspect social media will erase it altogether over time. Similarly, my father had no New Jersey accent to speak of by the time we were born, and my mother no Chinese accent of significance. We all came to speak the Standard American English dialect. I suppose it's a kind of victory for the universalism desired by modernism. Clearly though, it's not all bad, and has certain advantages. Regardless, I don't see us moving anywhere but towards more of it.
"for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them..." Indeed it is of profound importance that those who educate direct themselves toward those things that are most true and important, but it's not an easy task...
I have mixed feelings about it. There was something special about the old America, with its regional and cultural diversity; there's a lot to be said against watching that washed away into a sort-of sameness.
It definitely has advantages, however, in terms of the ease of communication and common understanding. As you note, immigrants and Americans from sub-cultures have undergone the same process as a part of assimilation to the America we have today.
Cultures that formally resist such processes sometimes call it 'cultural genocide' and describe the dominant culture educating you out of your old culture and heritage as a sort of oppression. And perhaps it is that; but such cultures rarely do very well, because the price of insularity can be quite high. Perhaps it can also be worth it, though, if your culture is really worth defending (and I can think of counterexamples for whom it has worked reasonably well to defend high walls around their culture, without losing access to markets and economic goods).
7 comments:
Good interview!
Thank you.
I thought you'd sound different- a little more Georgia, but I guess not. It was interesting.
When I was young, the public school taught speech and diction classes designed to make us not sound Southern. It was explained to us that this was important to our future because a Southern accent would be assumed to be proof of low intelligence as well as ignorance and a commitment to racism. They worked quite hard on training it out of us. I suppose it worked.
I suspect social media will erase it altogether over time. Similarly, my father had no New Jersey accent to speak of by the time we were born, and my mother no Chinese accent of significance. We all came to speak the Standard American English dialect. I suppose it's a kind of victory for the universalism desired by modernism. Clearly though, it's not all bad, and has certain advantages. Regardless, I don't see us moving anywhere but towards more of it.
"for it is this that ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state, and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them..."
Indeed it is of profound importance that those who educate direct themselves toward those things that are most true and important, but it's not an easy task...
I have mixed feelings about it. There was something special about the old America, with its regional and cultural diversity; there's a lot to be said against watching that washed away into a sort-of sameness.
It definitely has advantages, however, in terms of the ease of communication and common understanding. As you note, immigrants and Americans from sub-cultures have undergone the same process as a part of assimilation to the America we have today.
Cultures that formally resist such processes sometimes call it 'cultural genocide' and describe the dominant culture educating you out of your old culture and heritage as a sort of oppression. And perhaps it is that; but such cultures rarely do very well, because the price of insularity can be quite high. Perhaps it can also be worth it, though, if your culture is really worth defending (and I can think of counterexamples for whom it has worked reasonably well to defend high walls around their culture, without losing access to markets and economic goods).
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