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Language cements a child's class destiny into place in its first three years Polly Toynbee Friday January 2, 2004 The Guardian Class is the great taboo. Politicians don't talk about it: it is the great unmentionable everyone conspires to pretend is a thing of the past, laughing at the old upstairs/downstairs hierarchies as if class itself had vanished along with domestic service. The classlessness myth began in the 1960s as the young of my generation imagined they had shed it in a youth culture that spanned all classes. Football fetishism among middle-class men now allows them to pretend that all pleasures cross the class divide these days. Much is made of the BBC encouraging regional accents. Celebrity, people like to say, has taken the place of class. But writing my recent book where I took low-paid work, I only had to see the amazement on the faces of friends and colleagues to be sharply reminded how deep class remains. You, take a job as a cleaner? You, cross that iron boundary between work with brain and work with hand? What about your accent and vocabulary? What about the way you look and dress? What about - well everything that says at once you are a middle-class woman? (It didn't really matter, because anyone willing to do the worst jobs for the least pay is in the same boat - but that's another story.) To be sure, politicians talk honestly about poverty, deprivation, social exclusion and disadvantage. Money is a vital ingredient in class. Tax credits and higher benefits have made the poorest families much better off, as research shows how they spend the extra cash well on children's basic needs. But disadvantage is not just about money: it is also about the unmentionable - class. Cycles of deprivation persist where the least educated are destined to have children who will also fail at school. As it is, class mobility in the UK and US is now all but stagnant after the last generation saw a steep upward swing from blue collar to the white collar, home-owning middle class. All the figures show movement has stopped dead. The one-third left behind are now firmly glued to the floor. What can be done? A vital piece of social research from America reaches right down into the heart of the matter. It should be read by politicians of every party, who all profess to want to see disadvantaged children succeed. A key ingredient in determining future social class is language - the basic tool for thought, argument, reasoning and making sense of a confusing world. There is only a short time during the first three years that the brain absorbs language, the concepts it embodies and the culture implied. Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children is one of the most thorough studies ever conducted. Three groups of children were tape-recorded throughout their first years - welfare families, working-class families and professional families. With painstaking care, researchers counted then extrapolated all the words a child would hear and speak in every encounter and interaction with its parent or care-giver. When they analysed the hours of recordings, the sharp class differences in the three groups' early experiences were startling. By the age of four, a professional's child will have had 50m words addressed to it, a working-class child 30m and a welfare child just 12m. Consider this: they found the professional child at the age of three had a bigger vocabulary than the parent of the welfare child. The way children were spoken to was also measured, how much they were listened to, explained things, given choices and in what tone of voice. So at the age of three the professional child has had 700,000 encouragements addressed to it and only some 80,000 discouragements. But the welfare child will only ever have been encouraged 60,000 times in its life, suffering twice as many discouragements, with the working-class child between the two. You get the picture: this is a statistical analysis of what we all observe - the damage done by the poor harassed mother walloping her child in the supermarket when the child has only made a reasonable request. There is no room here to do justice to this epic analysis, but no one could fail to be convinced by it: it confirms what we all secretly know already. The educated are better at communicating with their children than the uneducated - and the child is branded for life. When the children in the study were measured at aged nine to 10, the authors, with an uncharacteristic slip from their stern academic terminology, conclude: "We were awestruck at how well our measures of accomplishments at three predicted language skill at nine to 10." In other words, school had added little value after the age of three: it was already too late. Smug conservatives might think this confirms all their prejudices: class is in the DNA, or at least permanently deep-dyed into a child's immutable culture. But the point of this work is to prove it is not so. Intervention works. Give very young children intensive interaction with teachers and they make up for what they lack at home; parents can easily be taught to read and talk to their children constructively. IQ, they say, is only a measure of the child's early experience and that can be changed. But it takes a major effort: to get the welfare child up to the vocabulary standard of the working-class child, it would take 41 hours a week of talking at the level offered by the professional parent. So if we really want to change class destiny, it can be done. But it takes good teachers in high-quality children's centres where children of all classes mix, not bundling all the deprived together. The Treasury sees a limited roll-out of children's centres in poor areas as a getting-mothers-off-benefit-and-back-to-work policy. But if they took the long (and expensive) view, this must be Labour's key remedy for social class division. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
