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304 Albert Scherr
1. School, nation, culture and language
State-managed education of children and adolescents in schools is a fundamen-
tal characteristic of modern societies. Historically and socio-systematically,
there is an intimate connection between industrial capitalism, nation-statehood,
the establishment of state schools, and the enforcement of universal schooling,
as has been pointed out by Talcott Parsons (Parsons 1971: 94.). On the one hand,
the growth and enforcement of a state-managed educational system can be
understood as a reaction to the social, spatial and temporal separations between
family and wage-earning work that industrialization imposed, for industrial
work meant that families were no longer in a position to give their children the
knowledge needed to enter the work force. Thus, general education outside the
family became the rule rather than the exception. On the other hand, however –
and for the present purposes this is the decisive point – schools acquired essen-
tial significance in the effort to enforce the political idea of a unified national
state with a homogeneous culture and language. Schools were to enable all fu-
ture citizens to communicate in the standard national language, and they were
meant to give them a historical and political understanding of themselves as
citizens as well as a national identity (cf. Gellner 1983: Chapter 3).
The establishment and school-based transmission of a unified national lin-
guistic standard, with a sharply drawn boundary to dialects and the linguistic
standards of other nations, is by no means merely a response to functional de-
mands of industrial capitalism or nation-state democracy. The “demand for the
linguistically homogeneous nation and the clearly distinct national language”
was, and for more than accidental reasons “remains a standard part of nationalist
ideology” (Barbour 2000: 14). Calls to national patriotism and unity resonate
most effectively with members of the national “imagined community” (Ander-
son 1991) when these, and no others, share the same common language. Seen in
this light, the establishment of national languages is an essential part of the pro-
cess that creates nation-states and national identities. Hence, it is hardly surpris-
ing that independence movements are often mingled with linguistic policies,
and the development of new nations – as happened during the disintegration of
Yugoslavia – is accompanied by efforts to emphasize and strengthen linguistic
differences and boundaries (Barbour and Carmichael 2000).
Furthermore, to the extent that schools implement certain nationally
oriented curricula (historical perspectives, national literary canons, geographic
descriptions), they are made the means of instilling in children and adolescents a
culture of the nation-state. From a socio-historical perspective the establishment
of schools is part of the effort to establish a national culture and language and to
marginalize traditional regional and class-specific cultures and languages, as
well as to establish cultural boundaries to other nations (Hobsbawm 1990: 80).
Out of a population excluded from political representation, living in local and