Interviews with Arkansas fourth, fifth, and sixth graders revealed a blatant contradiction between the objectives of the language arts curricula and the children's opinions about the appropriateness of their language. While the students uniformly regarded their own dialects as satisfactory and unchanged by school, when questioned specifically about the content of their English classes, they revealed awareness of the attempt to modify their grammar and linguistic styles. The dichotomy reflected in these responses is mirrored in two commonly used educational materials, a document which consolidates behavioral objectives for language and literature instruction in the Arkansas elementary and secondary schools and a series of elementary language arts textbooks. These materials reveal both an orientation which values the preservation of dialect variation and a point of view which stresses the importance of instituting standard English usage. (KS)