Argumentive Summary - Essay Example

Therefore, the household in which a child spends their preschool years can have a major impact on their success and educational development for many years to come. We might consider the extent Brice’s thesis is convincing, and to what extent the evidence she offers to support it is comprehensive. It seems to me that Heath’s work is extremely convincing, and offers a helpful analysis of a hugely important issue, that is, giving children the best start possible in their education. Heath makes an important contribution to academic work on the importance of the preschool environment for a child’s subsequent, formal education.

As well as dealing with the very particular examples of the three neighborhoods she selects for analysis, Heath also provokes the reader’s thoughts on more general issues, for example in commenting that teachers and researchers ‘have not recognized that ways of taking from books are as much a part of learned behavior as are ways of eating, sitting, playing games, and building houses’ (97). . Of course, the implications of this statement are central to the essay and its arguments. Heath’s essay is based on the assumption that a child will imitate practices they learn in the household, and these will either facilitate or obstruct the schooling process later on.

Heath is therefore positing the notion that due to their acquisition from the home environment, literary skills can be acquired as naturally as any others. Heath states that adults provide their children with ways ‘taking from books’, which will come to seem natural in schools, businesses, or offices (97). Given that we live in a highly literate society, where reading and writing are needed for even basic tasks, and having established that the basics of literacy can be taken from adults in the home environment, as discussed above, it is striking that Heath approaches a field on which little work has been done.

Little is known about the functioning of these processes in practice. Heath therefore performs a valuable task for the extension of our knowledge when she chooses to survey the importance of ‘literary events’, in which ‘participants follow socially established rules for verbalizing what they know about the written material’ (98). As the title of the essay indicates, one such event might be the bedtime story, and this theme is carried throughout Heath’s analysis. Heath’s approach is also interesting in that she does not just work on patterns detected in ‘mainstream’ households, but also on those she finds in alternative styles of household (98).

She chooses three communities in the Southeastern United States – a middle-income area called Maintown, where the households surveyed have a mother who has taught in local public schools (100); Roadville – a