Less Than Words Can Say

If you saw the 2004 Pixar hit The Incredibles, you might remember that Mr. Incredible, a.k.a. Bob, captures in one line the reason our schools are failing. Resisting his wife’s plea that Bob attend his son’s “graduation” from fourth grade, Bob growls, “We keep creating new ways to celebrate mediocrity!”

Today’s remake of that film would have Bob growl, “We keep creating new ways to celebrate illiteracy!” because the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is pressuring teachers and professors to drop the requirement that students learn to speak and write Standard American English.

Unfortunately, the NCTE is having some success.

That directive is a byproduct of the NCTE’s 2020 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), whose delegates demanded that

Teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm, which reflects White Mainstream English!

and that

Teachers develop and teach Black Linguistic Consciousness that works to decolonize the mind (and/or) language, unlearn white supremacy, and unravel anti-Black linguistic racism!

In short, delegates to that conference “DEMAND[ed] Black Linguistic Justice.”

If you thought that academe’s social-justice warriors would retreat in 2025, you will be disheartened to hear what just happened at the Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU).

If you thought academe’s social-justice warriors would retreat, you will be disheartened to hear what just happened at MSU. In compliance with the CCCC’s 2020 resolution, in December MSU’s Writing Center redefined Standard American English as “a social construct that privileges white communities and maintains social and racial hierarchies.” The writing center’s new policy urges students to “us[e] their English (whatever that may be) in communicating their thoughts and ideas.”

The Independence Institute was quick to mock MSU’s decision, calling it “Good News for White Supremacists” because it “helps assure that people of color stay at the bottom.” When the MSU writing center’s new posting made national news, university officials “removed that content” and assured students that MSU “remains committed to rigorous academic standards and preparing all students for success in life and careers.”

The NCTE’s “new priests” view grammar instruction as “an instrument of imperialist oppression.” A more likely outcome will have MSU’s writing center doing what other universities have done to avoid scrutiny—paying lip service to reform then proceeding unchallenged in their mission to “decolonize the mind (and/or) language” and “unlearn white supremacy.”

The battle over how to teach English has been going on since 1974, when NCTE’s Conference on College Composition and Communication issued this stunner:

We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.

That was the NCTE’s earliest warning that endorsing only one standard of English is “immoral” and need not be the goal of a college education. That notion betrays the very students whose “varieties of language” the NCTE meant to uphold.

English professor Richard Mitchell was the first to challenge the NCTE’s “new priests,” who view grammar instruction as “an instrument of imperialist oppression.” He had charmed wordsmiths nationwide in the 1970s and 80s by writing The Underground Grammarian, a newsletter that exposed any knave who abused the Mother Tongue because, as he wrote, “Bad English kills trees, consumes energy, and befouls the earth. Good English renews it.”

Talk-show host Johnny Carson took note and invited Mitchell to make his case on national television.

Dr. Mitchell’s most memorable appearance on Carson’s show aired in 1979, shortly after the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown. Before a rapt audience, he blamed the National Council of Teachers of English for the calamity, reasoning that, when the NCTE renounced grammar instruction, they “taught whole generations of people that small mistakes don’t matter.” More specifically, “When people trained that way go into very technical callings, without this habit of precision, they can kill us.”

Mitchell got a big laugh inventing a dialogue between the Three Mile Island technicians whose poor communication skills might have caused the calamity, but there was nothing funny about the NCTE’s plan to endorse nonstandard English, which, if enforced, would have caused a meltdown of communication skills nationwide.

To advance in any profession, one must demonstrate superb communication skills. 1979 was also the year Mitchell published a timeless little gem titled Less Than Words Can Say, which captured the new priests’ mission: “They have promised to teach social consciousness and environmental awareness, creativity, ethnic pride, and tolerance … provided, of course, that such skills didn’t involve irrelevant details like spelling and the agreement of subjects and verbs.”

As is so often true with “progressive” policies, the costs of academics’ obsessions fall on innocent people. In the years since Mitchell led the charge against the social-justice warriors, the NCTE has doubled down on its defense of nonstandard English, calling grammar instruction “a deterrent to the improvement of students’ speaking and writing” and urging teachers to “permit students to set goals for their own improvement.” What the authors of those resolutions—all crafted in Standard American English—can’t say out loud is that to advance in any profession, one must demonstrate superb communication skills, so the beneficiaries of “Black Linguistic Justice” need not aspire to join a profession.

As is so often true with “progressive” policies, the costs of academics’ obsessions fall on innocent people, in this instance students who might have otherwise learned to write clearly and properly and who will now be disadvantaged throughout their lives because they did not.

Nor can the NCTE admit that between 40 and 60 percent of today’s college freshmen must take a remedial course in English because their high-school teachers have followed what the NCTE claims “research shows” rather than what they know from their own experience. Learning the mechanics of English is like learning the mechanics of any language. It requires drill and practice, drill and practice.

With the advent of AI and online instruction, preparing students for the job market has never been easier to accomplish outside of class, so the NCTE’s argument that grammar instruction takes class time away from writing instruction no longer applies.

The fact is that college graduates with substandard communication skills will find themselves handicapped in the job market, regardless of their race or ethnicity. So says Ian Siegel, CEO of ZipRecruiter, which uses artificial intelligence to match employers with job applicants. Siegel forewarns applicants that “spelling and grammatical mistakes are among the top reasons a job applicant’s résumé lands in the trash.”

Using AI’s writing assistant Grammarly to craft an impressive résumé might score an applicant an interview, but there’s no safety net for the interviewee who, under pressure, slips up and says, “Her and I have wrote papers about this company!” That is the very sentence that quashed one applicant’s dream of working for a blue-chip firm.

Essayist Brooke Allen fears that we are transitioning into a “post-literate” world, but the Mother Tongue will survive if educators sidestep the NCTE’s misrule and adopt the Underground Grammarian’s motto: “Clear language engenders clear thought, and clear thought is the most important benefit of education.” That is true no matter the student’s race or ethnicity.

Nan Miller received her undergraduate degree from Wake Forest University and her M.A. in English from North Carolina State University. She taught college composition and literature for 26 years, eight years at NC State and 18 years at Meredith College, where she opened and directed the Meredith College Writing Center.