Response Paper

[Lindsay H.]

I have recently lamented that, in our current political climate, so many topics have become politicized. This includes topics ranging from the role of the free press in a democracy to the brands of beer that are ethically acceptable to purchase. Mooney and Evans challenged my perception of this shift in the “Language and Politics” chapter of Language, Society and Power. They define politics as “the process by which members of a community discuss and decide about how they are governed” (43). By this definition, these topics have always been political. A free press has always stood in opposition to authoritarianism, and I have always (unconsciously) supported Yuengling’s union-busting practices with my wallet. These topics only seem newly political because they have now become controversial; they never seemed “political” before because they were embedded in our society’s dominant ideologies. Recent controversy has simply exposed political ideology that has long been obscured. Similarly, when I have endeavored to diversify the texts read by the English department of the high school where I work, some have been nervous that this endeavor is “too political.” By Mooney and Evans’s definition, however, the choice to solely teach texts written by white men in the public school classroom is also political; it just seems less political because it reinforces the dominant ideology.

As an educator, I was intrigued by Mooney and Evans’s analysis of the impact of describing students in the higher education system as “customers” (57). Mooney and Evans associate several beliefs with this metaphor, including the beliefs that “[t]he customer is always ‘right’” and “[s]ervices provided should be dictated by market demand” (59). While Mooney and Evans discuss these beliefs in the context of higher education, this metaphor of students as customers seems to be increasingly relevant to public education, with the sole modification that in this case parents are the customers, not the students. Parents see themselves as part of a transactional exchange with the public school system through their role as taxpayers. Therefore, they may expect to be “right” when it comes to their children’s education, and they expect school to prepare their children for the market demand of the workforce. I have noticed that parents and community members are often referred to as “stakeholders” in the context of public education, which draws parallels between business and public education. I wonder whether referring to students’ parents as “taxpayers” and “stakeholders” is partially responsible for the rise of “helicopter” or “lawnmower” parents, as parents may feel that they are entitled to specific results in their children’s education as a result of their financial investment. In this way, it seems that the metaphor of parent as customer enables other metaphors of parents as helicopters or lawnmowers.

Mooney and Evans also point out that the market is often personified, and they assert that “[t]he construction of the market as a person is a political act” because it “has outcomes for real people, for their employment, housing and every aspect of their lives” (57). We are motivated to care for and protect the market when it is personified. Personification functions this way because of the ideology that human lives have inherent value. Therefore, linguistically, dehumanization has the opposite effect. While personifying the market makes us want to care for it, dehumanizing people often justifies violence and oppression. When my students and I analyze texts together, I encourage them to look out for ways that dehumanizing language is used to justify violence. In Of Mice and Men, for example, Steinbeck’s comparison of Lennie to animals paves the way for the justification of his death. This has direct implications for our current political discourse, in which people are frequently dehumanized and referred to as dogs, monkeys, and, more broadly, animals.