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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.