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Schools and cultural difference  303


                          15.    Schools and cultural difference


                                 Albert Scherr



                          As a rule, intercultural communication takes place between individuals who
                          have been educated in schools, and these will, to some degree, have inculcated
                          in them an understanding of their national statehood and culture. For indeed
                          schools are politically mandated to transmit the basic elements of citizenship
                          and national identity, in order to ensure the continuity and endurance of the
                          political community. This is true not only in those states that actively promote
                          national history, culture and identity; it is also true where prevailing political
                          values explicitly reject nationalistic programs and ideologies. At the same time,
                          schools are institutions that provoke some portion of their pupils to distance
                          themselves from the identity the schools seek to promote. Youthful rebellion
                          and the development of youth sub-cultures arise not the least from confrontation
                          with the norms of the dominant culture represented in school curricula and prac-
                          tices (Willis 1977, Eckert 2000).
                             For the transmission of national collective identity, and more generally for
                          the formation, transmission and acquisition of collective identifications of all
                          sorts, language obviously plays a central role; and just as the acceptance of a
                          tendered national identity usually goes hand in hand with the acquisition of a
                          national standard language, independent linguistic varieties often arise in con-
                          nection with collectively felt non-national, regional, ethnic or youth-culture
                          identities (Eckert 2000; Harris and Rampton 2003). As Ben Rampton (2003:
                          403) argues, the use of dialects by minority pupils and codeswitching in schools
                          can “constitute acts of resistance within a racist society”.
                             Thus, with respect to school as the institution which is centrally important
                          for language acquisition and the development of individuals’ construction of
                          their cultural membership, both aspects are systematically intertwined.
                             This contribution addresses, from an international, comparative perspective,
                          the questions of how schools as national, state-managed institutions bring forth
                          collective identities and distinctions, and of how they establish perspectives on
                          important features of non-national cultural identity (e.g., regional, ethnic, relig-
                          ious). It will reveal that how social and cultural heterogeneity are treated in the
                          context of school-based socialization and education is closely related to influen-
                          tial socio-political programs, and that these can only be understood against the
                          background of the given interlocking structures of social inequality and cultural
                          identification.
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