"Children's speech should be corrected?"

Most people who write about the troubles of slum children in school claim that slum children speak badly because their parents do not correct their speech. This leads to two conclusions. The first is that any child whose speech is not continually corrected will grow up speaking like a slum child; the second is that all we need to do to cure the speech problems and defects of slum children is correct their speech often enough. Both ideas are nonsense.
Children can, do, and will learn to speak the language that most people speak around them. If a child grows up where most people do not speak what is called standard English, then we will do only harm if we try to make him think there is something wrong with his speech. It will make much more sense, as some schools are beginning to do, to teach standard English as if it were a foreign language, encourage- ing a child to talk and write about things that interest him, in the way that is most natural to him, all the time exposing him to much standard English as possible.
I spoke at a PTA meeting recently, and repeated the story of Lisa giving the name “cows” to a class of animals including cows, horses, and sheep. I explained that we did not correct her because it would be discourteous; because we were too pleased to hear her talk to be worried about “mistakes”; and because, realizing that she had done some bold and powerful thinking, we did not want to do anything to make her doubt its worth or discourage her from doing more such thinking in the future. I also emphasized that correction was in fact not needed, that the child was soon able, by herself, to get her names and classes straightened out.
A certain number of people are always upset by hearing such stories. Soon after this meeting, I got a pleasant but agitated letter from an intelligent and highly trained psychologist who had heard my talk. How, she demanded, could children possibly learn unless we corrected all their mistakes? Wasn’t that our responsibility, our duty? I wrote a long reply, repeating my point and telling still more stories about children correcting their own mistakes. But she seems to be as far from understanding me as ever. It is almost as if she cannot hear what I am saying. This is natural enough. Any one who makes it his life work to help other people may come to believe that they cannot get along without him, and may not want to hear evidence that they can, all too often, stand on their own feet. Many people seem to have built their lives around the notion that they are in some way indispensable to children, and to question this is to attack the very center of their being.