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Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children is Hart and Risley's first report in book form on their extensive and comprehensive longitudinal study of children's language development. Their data, and the patterns found in them, are extraordinary, and have profound implications for the rearing and educating of children, and for how educators understand the contributions of environment to cognitive development. Their detailed recording of children's language experience over the first three years of life provides a rare example of assessing environmental quality.
Nature-nurture and the language environment
When educators address the nature-nurture issue, they are usually attracted to the nurture side of the argument (or, perhaps better, to that side of the balance). After all, education is essentially environmental. Perhaps because of their belief in the efficacy of education and environment, educators have avoided the difficult task of measuring environmental or educational influences. As a consequence, the nature-nurture debate has been dominated in recent years by those supporting the nature (genetic) view with relatively hard data, and those supporting the nurture side with appeals to social justice. A perfect illustration of this state of affairs is the debate engendered by Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve (1994; see also Cameron, 1995; Fraser, 1995; Jacoby & Glauberman, 1995). The style of much of the debate may leave the impression -- in my view, unwarranted -- that morality is on the side of environment but reality on the side of genetics. I do believe, however, that it is possible to assemble strong empirical evidence to support a healthy environmental position (healthy in the sense that it is viable. without denying the effects, often powerful, of genetics). All educators have to work with is environment, whether it contributes 1% or 50% to the equation. But if they believe in the efficacy of environment, it behooves them to devote themselves to its measurement.
One standard approach to the issue is to conflate environment with socioeconomic status (SES). As convenient as this conflation may be, primarily because SES is easy to measure, it is important to recognize two problems. First, SES is not a true causal entity -- it never has and never could influence something else; at best it is a proxy variable, representing the collective...