Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, By Lisa Delpit, New Press, New York, NY, 1995, 216 pp. $21.00 hardcover
“…what we need to bring to our schools [are] experiences that are so full of the wonder of life, so full of connectedness, so embedded in the context of our communities, so brilliant in the insights that we develop and the analyses that we devise, that all of us, teachers and students alike, can learn to live lives that leave us truly satisfied.”
–“Other People’s Children”
It was Rudyard Kipling who so adroitly observed that the story of the hunt would differ drastically “when lions learn to write.” And so the tables are aptly and brilliantly turned in this collection of eight essays and a speech by an African-American, Harvard-trained, MacArthur Prize-winning educator who is the current Benjamin E. Mays Professor of Urban Educational Leadership at Georgia State University. Not since Sonia Nieto’s “Affirming Diversity: The Social Policy Contexts of Multicultural Education” has such an illuminating, instructive probe of the salient issues of diversity and schooling been offered. Not since Shirley Brice Heath’s “Ways with Words” has the subject been treated with such candor and cogency.
“Other People’s Children” grabs the metaphoric hunter — in this case, pedagogy that assails and represses the language and learning of students of color — and refuses to let it go until it hollers “Uncle!” In the process, Lisa Delpit also stalks and subdues the critical factors that too many mainstream educators choose to ignore when the pupils before them differ from them — namely, when those students are “other people’s children,” that is, non-white boys and girls.
Delpit’s reflections and recommendations are well grounded in both theory and practice. As a sociolinguist and educational anthropologist, she brings a keen and often introspective analytical bent to this volume. She also brings the benefit of two decades of experience in classrooms peopled by an incredibly diverse array of teachers and students, in Native Alaskan schools, in culturally responsive preschools in Papua New Guinea, in resegregated schools in Inner-City, U.S.A., and in vastly different education settings.
In section one, “Controversies Revisited,” Delpit deftly sets forth and defends her evocative ideas. The book’s second essay, “The Silenced Dialogue,” first appeared in the Harvard Educational Review in 1988 as a response to critics of the lead essay, “Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator.” For the “Skills” article, published in “HER” in 1986, Delpit garnered a lion’s share of reproach from advocates of whole language and writing process instruction who claimed she was disparaging these avant-garde modes of teaching and condoning oppressive, rote- and- drill-based methods for students of color. Delpit writes in her introduction about the harsh reproof “Skills” drew when it first appeared, recalling a time when analyses and conclusions such as hers would have been maligned as a matter of course — when educational power-wielders would have dismissed her views as intellectual impudence on the part of an African-American teacher. Apparently unbowed, she forges ahead by including these articles in this book and complementing them with another reprinted piece, “Language Diversity and Learning,” which takes a comprehensive look at the operative dissonances in language use and form in multicultural classrooms.
