Win,

I see your point perfectly, and as I was saying, I support the notion that the general population should be literate. I was just introducing a "cultural relativity" angle. There are other dialects of English and most of the "rules" are invented after the fact, and usually to support the currently royalty. That is not the same as supporting illiteracy, which is of course to be discouraged.

I was also introducing the idea that the cause of an "under educated" under class within our society has to do with its structural stratification, which I view as an inequity, one that has deep roots, going back to European colonization of the world.

If the education standards in the US are also to blame then we can also see its rapid decline over the past few decades, though total costs have been rising.

There is also the notion of a tremendous population increase in the 20th century. In 1900 the world's population was barely over a billion where 90% of the US population lived in a rural setting. By 1960 the world's population was about 2 billion and now about 90% of the US population lives in cities. A huge urbanization movement in the course of less than 100 years, where the world's population has grown from about 1 billion to somewhere around 7 billion.

I don't think the current social structure, which developed somewhere in the 19th century, can handle this increase in population nor of total output of production. I think I read somewhere that the world produced (global GNP) about 500 billion worth of goods and services in 1900, several trillion in the 1950's and about 50 trillion now, far outstripping population growth. The report also forecasted global GNP to be at 250 trillion by 2050. Our current social structure cannot seem to provide for the 7 billion we have, let alone educate most of us.

The inner city dialects may sound uncooth but they have a cultural relevance all their own, was the point I was trying to make. Besides, I was also hinting at the fact that some of these criticisms, in some people's cases, not here, might have a racial component to them, that here we have proof of inferiority, when all I was seeing was a uneducated dialect developing, that is perfectly relevant in its own way. In general, academia is judgmental of the working classes, and yet are content to live off the surplus they produce in our society. There's many sides to every coin, not just the obvious fact that there is a notion of "proper English" that the under classes find unreachable.