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In industrial societies, the main items produced were commodities and, in a later phase, services. In industrial societies the ones who did well were those who controlled access to raw materials and owned the other prerequisites and means of production. When we move ahead to an information proper, the main 'commodities' produced are and ideas. These are mainly transmitted through language(s) (and visual images). In this kind of information society, or knowledge society as it has also been called, those with access to diverse knowledges, diverse information and ideas, will do well, the creativity argument claims. A certain degree of uniformity might have promoted some aspects of industrialisation, but in postindustrial information societies uniformity will be a handicap. Creativity precedes innovation, also in commodity production, and investment follows creativity. Multilingualism enhances creativity. High-level multilinguals as a group do better than corresponding monolinguals on tests measuring several aspects of 'intelligence', creativity, divergent thinking, cognitive flexibility, etc. In an information society, those parts of the world will do well where multilingualism has been and is the norm, even among people with no or little formal education, and where there is a rich linguistic and cultural diversity, embodying diverse knowledges. The countries with mega-diversities have had more various micro-environments to observe, analyse, describe and discuss than countries with less diversity, and all of these knowledges have been encoded in their many languages. They have in this sense access to more varied knowledges, ideas, and cosmo-visions than countries with few languages and cultures. Getting return on investment for supporting multilingualism presupposes that the multilinguals in these countries get access to exchanging and refining these knowledges which they may, in a thoroughly wired satelliteand chip-driven global society. This presupposes in most cases education through the medium of the mother tongue, even for numerically small groups. Thus linguistic human rights in education build on and produce not only local linguistic and cultural capital but capital that is exchangeable to other types of capital. In this sense, Europe, with only 3% of the world's oral languages, is poor, whereas Africa is rich provided that the linguistic and cultural diversity and biodiversity are maintained, rather than destroyed. In order to adapt to the massive changes in today's globalisation, people need adaptability, fitness, that requires creativity. Colin Baker summarizes in his review of Skutnabb-Kangas 200 the views on the relationship between linguistic and cultural diversity, biodiversity, and creativity: Ecological diversity is essential for long-term planetary survival. All living organisms, plants, animals, bacteria and humans survive and prosper through a network of complex and delicate relationships. Damaging one of the elements in the ecosystem will result in unforeseen consequences for the whole of the system. Evolution has been aided by genetic diversity, with species genetically adapting in order to survive in different environments. Diversity contains the potential for adaptation. Uniformity can endanger a species by providing inflexibility and unadaptability. Linguistic diversity and biological diversity are ... inseparable. The range of cross fertilisation becomes less as languages and cultures die and the testimony of human intellectual achievement is lessened. In the language of ecology, the strongest ecosystems are those that are the most diverse. That is, diversity is directly related to stability; variety is important for long-term survival. Our success on this planet has been due to an ability to adapt to different kinds of environment over thousands of years (atmospheric as well as cultural). Such ability is born out of diversity. Thus language and cultural diversity maximises chances of human success and adaptability (from Colin Baker's review of Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, Baker 2001: 281). If we during the next 100 years murder 50-90% of the linguistic (and thereby mostly also the cultural) diversity which is our treasury of historically developed knowledge, and includes about how to maintain and use sustainably some of the most vulnerable and most biologically diverse environments in the world, we are also seriously undermining our chances of life on earth. Killing linguistic diversity is then, just as the killing of biodiversity, dangerous reductionism. All monocultures are vulnerable, terms of language and culture reduction as well as in agriculture, horticulture and animal husbandry, as we see in increasingly more dramatic ways, when animals, bacteria and crops which are more and more resistant (to antibiotics, to Roundups, etc), are starting to spread and we have just seen the tip of the iceberg. With genetic manipulations the problems are mounting rapidly. In terms of the new ways of coping that we are going to need, the potential for the new lateral thinking that might save us from ourselves in time, lies in having as many and as diverse languages and cultures as possible. We do not know which ones have the right medicine. For maintaining all of them, multilingualism is necessary. Multilingualism, based on full command of the mother tongue(s) and adding on, should of course, then be one of the most important goals in education. But is it? There are already today in Africa and Asia local people who know no African or Asian languages. There are grandparents who cannot communicate with their monolingual Englishspeaking grandchildren. If the future African and Asian elites have English as their only or main intellectual language, what chances do they have to understand the needs of their countrymen and women, most of whom do not speak English? If they know nothing of their continents' ancient and present cultures, how could they possibly enhance development? Europe is both genetically and linguistically the poorest part of the world (3% of the world's languages, if we count in ex-Soviet Union and discount the languages of recent immigrants). Still, education of most national and almost all immigrant minorities participates in committing linguistic genocide (according to United Nations definitions of genocide), instead of supporting the languages that could enrich Europe. Australia and North America have killed off more indigenous languages during the last 200 years than any other parts of the world, and they continue this policy with immigrant minority languages in schools. All official languages are potential threats to indigenous and minority languages, but English is the killer language over all others. Of course achieving high levels of competence in English is something that enhances one's chances on the labour market. The question is NOT whether or not children should learn English of course they should. The question is how they can best do it. In most situations in the world using English as the medium of education for non-English speaking children is not a solution. It is a big problem. Carol Bloch from South Africa has started speaking of English not as the medium of instruction in Africa but English as the medium of destruction. Similar processes can be discussed with all big languages (Mandarine Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, English, Bengali, Portuguese, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, German, Korean, French, Javanese, Telugu, Vietnamese, just to take the 15 languages with the highest numbers of first language speakers, in order) and all those languages which are taught and spread subtractively (at the cost of people's first languages), instead of additively, adding to their repertoires. Using a foreign medium of instruction is today the most important pedagogical reason for illiteracy. Educational linguistic human rights, including the right to mother tongue medium education, might be part of a solution, even when schools alone cannot save languages whereas they can kill a language, even in one generation, more or less on their own, as Joshua Fishman claims. But with the ongoing erosion, led by the USA, of the three 1990s mantras (democracy, rule of law, human rights) which accompanied the neo-liberal globalisation ideology of the free markets, there is not much hope. The paper will discuss the present situation of the world's languages and the role that education (and researchers?) play in their destruction in this light. Some positive examples of the opposite will also be given.
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