The poor "barely able to speak"

Mary Beard's blog about Social Mobility:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/01/social-mobility-down-and-up.html

My response to a comment:

Ysabel H writes:
"I could read at 3. That is the true privilege the educated middle-classes confer on their young. Others arrive at school barely able to speak."
The reading bit is a real discriminator in favour of the literate ie it's not enough to be born human, you've got to choose your parents and your place of upbringing.
The second point is brain-dead prejudice.
All kids in a social context can think and speak perfectly adequately. It's just that their thoughts and speech are spat on by the privileged and their parasites (eg teachers).
Their concepts develop in their own social context for the purposes of this context. If the context is local - a sink estate, a slum, a ghetto, a discriminated and excluded group (travellers, blacks, women) - then these concepts and non-standard language can form a very strong disincentive to moving out into broader (received) society.
I taught at a school in Sweden's third or fourth most underprivileged district for 15 years. This taught me that what we were doing as teachers was providing a bridge for some of the kids into wider society. Of course some teachers (the bouncers) spent most of their time and effort trying to blow the bridge to kingdom come - as NATO did to the Petrovaradin bridge in Novi Sad while it was bombing the shit out of Serbia.
For a devastating scholarly counter-attack on this prejudice read Labov's paper “The Logic of Nonstandard English” from 1969 (plus ca change..) (Labov himself on this: http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/sociolinguistics/labov/ ). It vaporizes Bernstein's pretentious bombast.
It's a linguistic commonplace that every language is as adequate as any other for the socio-cultural purposes of the community in which it's native. Just as it's a democratic commonplace that every person is born equal and is just as adequate as a human being as any other.
All people are born free, but everywhere they're in chains.
And these chains are often mind-forged manacles.
In fact, for most of us, all we have to lose are these chains.
QED.