The bimonthly publication English Journal is an inept
guardian of English. The National Council of Teachers of English
runs the publication. It reports a circulation of “approximately
45,000 middle school, junior high school, and senior high school
teachers, supervisors, and teacher educators.”
“Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth through Engaging
Hip-hop Culture,” an article by Ernest Morrell and Jeffrey M.R.
Duncan-Andrade, appeared in the July 2002 English Journal.
This is what thousands of educators in America’s failing public
schools need to hear?
Rap is substandard English. How can substandard English advance
the cause of standard English? Why is a publication for English
teachers encouraging them to use the worst examples of English to
teach their subject?
English is a subject too important to be left to public school
English teachers swallowing this junk. In thrall to educational
gimmicks, many of them consider it the height of academic
sophistication to introduce rap into the three R’s.
The English Journal article in defense of this practice
contains academic jargon and reasoning as unintelligible as the rap
lyrics it romanticizes.
Morrell and Duncan-Andrade consider rap a discipline worthy of
doctoral work, and a useful political tool for whipping up
resentment. “It is possible to perform feminist, Marxist,
structuralist, psychoanalytic, or postmodernist critiques of
particular Hip-hop texts,” they write. “Teaching Hip-hop as a music
and culture of resistance can facilitate the development of
critical consciousness in urban youth.”
Moreover, they argue, rap is a spur to serious education. Snoop
Dogg is a bridge to Shakespeare. “Hip-hop can be used as a bridge
linking the seemingly vast span between the streets and the world
of academics,” they write implausibly. But even here they show
reluctance, since they believe “Hip-hop music should stand on its
own merit in the academy and be a worthy subject of study in its
own right rather than necessarily leading to something more
‘acceptable’ like a Shakespeare text.”
In other words, these authors want rap mainstreamed in high
schools because they support its “culture of resistance” and don’t
consider the “acceptable” canon all that important. Their “bridge”
to serious education is politically dynamited to guarantee that few
public school students receive a serious education.
Rap is a bridge not to academic literacy but to a culture of
violence and depravity, a culture which equates learning with
selling out. Encouraging students to imbibe anti-intellectual rap
will not make them intellectuals. But English Journal’s
readers, desperate to appear sufficiently enlightened and trendy,
will no doubt take the conclusions of this ludicrous article
seriously. Lyrics about whores and pimps and gangsters will now
take their place next to the sonnets of John Keats and Dante — or,
even more likely, replace those works altogether.
Public schools can’t teach their students to read at a high
school level, but they will teach them to rap at a high school
level. Public school educators often describe their schools as a
refuge from the ghetto. They say that taxpayers should happily
finance schools which serve as an escape from the ghetto. But it
turns out that the public schools don’t want their students to
leave the ghetto at all. They want them to bring the ghetto with
them to school. A ghetto blaster is just as good, maybe even
better, than a book.
Usually public school teachers, as good gun-control liberals,
don’t like gun culture. But they will make an exception in this
case. The works of Tupac Shakur and Public Enemy contain too much
academic merit to quibble about Hip-hop culture’s attachment to
killing people.
Perhaps the English Journal should now publish an
article in defense of graffiti as an important first step toward
writing good essays. Or maybe it is time to bring video poker into
Algebra class. And why not start the first few days of a high
school theater class with pornography? “Relevance,” “start with
what kids know” — if these are the imperatives of modern
education, as the English Journal suggests, there is no
end to the destructive novelties and innovations public schools
will entertain.
