(Source: Leaving “No Child Left Behind” Behind from The Class Struggle)
In the film Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden, we are repeatedly told that minority and traditional cultures and languages are being crushed by the cogs of formalized, mass, Western education. The film provides testimonies of young men and women who have moved to New Delhi and have become caught up in Western culture; “They tend to forget their own culture … sometimes they don’t even know how to speak their own language” (Schooling the World, 2010)1.
English has taken the linguistic world hostage and represses all others in its wake. Western education is thus seducing and destroying the myriad of cultures in the world by contorting them all into one homogeneous product for industrialization.
In a majority of instances, Schooling the World is correct, yet there are other sides of formal, Western education that are not so destructive to languages. Minority languages can sometimes be preserved by formal education. Furthermore, having children learn the lingua franca of the day, i.e. English, can lead to increased dialogue between cultures rather than being a purely malevolent force. Granted, history is wrought with examples of minority groups, cultures, and languages being attacked by a foreign government and culture. Yet this is not a necessary outcome of education today as Schooling the World purports it to be.
It all depends on how you teach and who supports you.
The Acadians in Louisiana speak a dialect of French and by all intensive purposes can be said to be under constant pressure and influence from English. Welsh is sympathetic to this plight. Yet rather than seeing education trying to eradicate these minority languages, we see immersion schools. These minority languages are assisted by organizations promoting their development and use, but both are instructed at schools in the region and supported by local government2. Thus it is not that education is a form of mental enslavement 100% effective at eradicating minority groups and their languages. What Schooling the World forgets is that education is a medium that can be used for both good and evil, depending on its handling and your perspective.
However, we would not even be having this conversation with minority groups if we did not have some medium of communication. Rather than lambasting education due to how it has been executed in the past, we have to remember that instructing foreign languages and a lingua franca do allow for a dialogue to take place, and that we can change how they are taught in the future. While some fear that “the profit motive will inevitably gravitate towards dominant languages” (Shields, 2013, p. 32)3, multilingualism through education is in itself nothing to be feared. Loss of identity is. Education does not signify an attack on culture if governments actively fight to protect minority cultures.
This can be the verse where governments pick up the mic and make education their own track.
1See Grossan, M. (Producer), Hurst, J. (Producer), Marlens, N. (Producer) & Black, C. (Director). (2010). Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden (Motion picture). The United States of America.
2See Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism (2013) and Welsh Language (Wales) Measure 2011 (2011).
3See Shields, R. (2013). Globalization and International Education. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
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