There are quite a few interesting articles in today’s Wall Street Journal, but two things in particular have stayed on my mind.
I have long been fascinated about the various inquiries and arguments over whether or not language imposes constraints on how we think. An article in today’s paper provides some additional information: How the Brain Learns to Read Can Depend on the Language.
Here are some relevant quotes:
Among children raised to read and write Chinese, the demands of reading draw on parts of the brain untouched by the English alphabet, new neuroimaging studies reveal.
Now I don’t particularly find it surprising that language affects the way one thinks. Languages have different structures. Languages can differ widely in their content, with one language having far different emphasis or descriptive content for certain things than another language might use. Whether these differences are entirely cultural (does the culture influence the language or the language the culture?) or something else entirely seems not so simple to discern.
It does seem obvious to me that people who are reared in different cultures do not make the same assumptions about life and human behavior, despite the tendency of many people to assume that all people “think like us”.
This next bit is telling:
To learn the ABCs of English we essentially harness our listening skills to a phonetic code. To become literate in Chinese, however, we must make much heavier use of memory, motor control and visual-perception circuits located toward the front of the brain. Children can master the 6,000 or so Chinese characters used in Mandarin and Cantonese text only by laboriously copying them out over and over again, until each abstract form becomes second nature.
Therefore, if the way we process and organize information is inherently connected to the language in which we organize and process that information, then the way we use our brains would also be different. This would have wide ramifications in terms so many things. This is probably a very naïve stretch for me to be making as I have no training in these matters and I may be jumping to conclusions that are completely out of line.
Even when readers in both languages looked at the same written characters, the brain activity was different……Arabic numerals of standard arithmetic – used by readers of Chinese and English alike – activate different brain regions depending on which of the two languages people had first learned to read
But even though math is “universal” we still need to find a way to make sense of it in our minds. Upon reading this G remarked that his father, who was completely fluent in English and never used his native language of Hungarian, always reverted back to Hungarian when doing math. G specifically remembers his father checking his homework and doing all the figures in Hungarian, although he otherwise never spoke it. But the way he learned math must have been tied into the way his brain processed his native language.
I find this completely fascinating. And now I have something else to explore further.
And in one of the columns at the end of the Weekend Journal, I find this: Not by Tuition Breaks Alone. In a personal account of one child’s attempt to apply to college from an economically disadvantaged school, we get this:
But what stands between disadvantaged kids and college is not mere money. It is orderliness, attentive mentoring and simple organizational guidance. Public schools used to be the great equalizer in America – the institutions that allowed the children of immigrants and the descendants of slaves to become fluent in the English language and prepare them for careers. In too many urban areas, they don’t perform such basic educational functions. But they don’t offer structured environments, either, for the few students who are trying to lift themselves up and get a better educational experience at college.
Go, read this, and think.
If we, the middle class, the educated, and yes the “liberal” elite continue to pull our children out of the public schools we are abandoning a whole generation of children. I can think of several of my college friends who pulled themselves up from nothing to win scholarships to elite schools and who now send their children to private schools. Or they “sacrifice” themselves by moving to further and further suburbs, leaving the cities behind. Is this not denying future generations the very opportunities they were able to grab hold of. We worry about the poor and starving in countries far from home while we deny our own disadvantaged souls a chance at achieving the American Dream. In once sense we are denying our own history. Is this really the world we want to create for the coming generations?
