Ruth’s Sociology Resources Blog

This article looking at the way in which foreign languages other than the traditional French, German and Spanish are typically ignored or offered low status in education picks up on two key issues in education - the presence of an ethnocentric curriculum and a hegemony of knowledge.

As regards the ethnocentric curriculum, it picks up the fact that “traditional” Western European languages are seen as more important to be learnt in school than languages such as Mandarin Chinese or Urdu or Arabic.  This sidelines the linguistic abilities of many minority ethnic pupils in the UK who may be fluent in two or more languages but whose skills are often dismissed.  This suggests that our curriculum and education system are still very much centred around white Western-European culture.

The fact that some kinds of linguistic knowledge are more important than others suggests that “traditional” language knowledge such as French and German remains hegemonic  in the education system.  Michael Apple (who writes from a neo-Marxist perspective) would argue that this hegemony reflects the interests of the powerful groups in society and that they play a significant role in deciding what knowledge is transmitted in schools and the importance attributed to that knowledge.  In this case those in power in British society are typically white British, and the maintenance of the low status of minority group languages in the UK could be said to help maintain that power.

BBC NEWS | Education | School ’snobbery’ over languages