Students Right to their Own Language

Perennial old-school curricular curmudgeon Stanley Fish has recently published a series of blog posts on composition instruction (see also part 2, part 3). He speaks directly to a writing prompt I've given one of my classes. As something of a coup de grace of rhetorical flourish he concludes,

First, you must clear your mind of the orthodoxies that have taken hold in the composition world. The main orthodoxy is nicely encapsulated in this resolution adopted in 1974 by the Conference on College Composition and Communication: “We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language — the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style”[hotlinks mine].

His post is a fairly lengthy response to my prompt; he just didn't know it. Personally I feel about his ideas the way I feel about my grandma's rendered pork cracklings: way salty, good with beer, and satisfying, despite the fact that you can feel your arteries hardening. We're talking a serious fat and cholesterol cocktail of epic proportions. Everything has consequences.

His comment, on the advisability of dialogue with students re: linguistic systems and democratic values, gives me pause for thought. Have we not done that in class? Has it been successful?