teaching, killing words, and castrating tongues

Virigina Woolf delivered this gorgeous "Eulogy to Words" in 1937. Part of the reason that words are dead (or at least are lacking the power they once had), she claimed, was that "we refuse to allow words their liberty, we pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning...the meaning which makes us pass examinations."

Anna West describes the same problem in our age of state standards and standardized tests in a poem that speaks for itself, beginning with the title: "Battle for the Board of Ed (who thinks language arts is commas, clauses, correctness and the castration of the tongue before it ever emerges)." Oh, how I wish the Board of Ed would click on that link.

So this issue isn't new; perhaps it's one of the rare things about English that hasn't changed from Woolf's world to ours? The accents and diction and even punctuation have changed, but through it all, education remains at odds with powerful, artful language. That's pretty remarkable, really. Tests are often blamed, but we all know that the problem is more complex than that. It's a truism in anthropology that the act of observing a thing changes it. Perhaps it's become a truism in education that the teaching of language dries it up and hollows it out. It's frustrating to imagine that we've known about this problem for nearly a century but haven't made a dent in it.As a teacher, it's downright painful to think that I'm harming what I love most (students and language). Perhaps we're asking kids to write expressively and powerfully even as we're undermining their ability to do just that. No wonder so many of them are fed up, frustrated and totally resistant to school.

Not much that we've done since 1937 seems to have altered this, so what do we do next as we try to build a system that lives up to its promises? Can it be done by individual teachers in the current system (and if so, how do we enable more teachers to do it) or is it impossible without a radical overhaul? How do we educate in a way that enlivens and empowers? I don't want to kill words, and I'd like to have nothing to do with castrating tongues.