Years to know them

Supporting some of these claims is a recent book that studies the reading and writing of a selected group of college students at City University of New York (CUNY) over six years, taking account of their personal as well as their academic lives. Marilyn S. Sternglass' Time to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College Level ² uncovers myriad factors that contributed to the development of these students as thinkers and writers who struggled against social, family work and economic constraints, yet managed to succeed.

But here's the rub. It took time, more time than almost any remedial program inside or outside an institution, anywhere in the US or Canada, is currently mandated to offer. Sternglass, in painting a portrait of the nine mainly minority students who remained in her study over the full six years, shows how they grew from underprepared students who could barely construct an acceptable academic assignment, into mature graduates who are holding full time jobs and supporting families with pride and dignity, often the first of their family to ever achieve this goal. She offers no neat solutions or quick fixes, but does ask what kind of society we are creating when we refuse to recognize the inequities in the lives of our most marginalized students that deny them the possibility of succeeding in our school systems in the same time frame as those more privileged.

CUNY was at the forefront of open admissions in the early 1970's and is at the forefront of retrenchment in the 1990's. Where the system was once willing to look at itself critically and see that adjustments and supports were required, now the blame has been shifted back to the student. Some critics suggest that open admissions failed because so many did not "make the grade" or took too long to do it, but others suggest that it provided options to thousands who did find a way through and who would never have made it otherwise. The argument can be applied to colleges across Canada and the US.

Transpose this study to the literacy sector, and many parallels exist. Formal programs are getting shorter and more functional; testing is used for gate-keeping; options for adult basic learning are diminishing; those furthest behind are least likely to find a way into current systems, much less a way through, as special needs support and time are absent.

When systems imposes false “standards" that force everyone into time-limited learning tracks, when we fail to distinguish between "false" and "authentic beginners," we perpetuate grave social injustices. Learning defies time frames; for real beginners, the road can be very long. [LS]

1 James Paul Gee, " Learning Language as a Matter of Learning Social Languages within Discourses," Paper presented at the Conference of College Composition and Communication, Atlanta, April 1999. Professor Gee is available at the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Teacher Education Building, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI, 53706. jgee@mail.soemadison.wisc.edu

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