Multilingualism: A threat to public education or a resource in public education? – European histories and realities

Abstract

Public education systems in Europe were created in the course of the foundation of the ‘classical’ nation state in the 18th and 19th centuries. Historical analyses show that it was part of their destiny to contribute to the consolidation of the respective states’ national self-design. In the 19th century, the myth developed that a nation state is monolingual not by its creation but ‘by mere nature’, and that monolingualism in the national language is the ‘natural’ result of being born and growing up in a nation state. Many of today’s public education systems are still based on this notion of linguistic ‘normality’ with respect to the composition of their clientele as well as their image of an individual ‘normal’ child(hood). However, the populations of nation states are in fact multilingual. Linguistic diversity increased as a result of migration and factors such as technical means for virtually ‘borderless’ communication. My contribution presents the European traditions of nation building since the late 1700s and asks for the functionality of monolingual habitual practice in education systems today. First results from an empirical study are presented which illustrate individual language abilities of multilingual children and the potential of linguistic diversity as a resource.

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