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Schools and cultural difference 305

regional frames of reference, schools are established to create citizens aware of
their nation, who understand the language of their national government, feel
themselves represented by it, are ready to serve in its armed forces, are willing
to migrate within the national boundaries, and are prepared to accept the de-
mands of working in its factories and living in its cities. Education is thus a key
element in nation building, while schools and armies are an essential component
of the state’s communicative apparatus, meant “to spread the image and the
heritage of the ‘nation’ and to inculcate attachment to it and to attach all to
country and flag, often ‘inventing traditions’ or even nations for this purpose”
(Hobsbawm 1990: 91).
Today, this patriotic amalgam of education with nation-state, national lan-
guage and national culture still has its adherents, but world-wide it is by no
means the only accepted model. To be sure, schools continue to be important
socio-political institutions that must help to transmit a national language, as
well as nationally significant knowledge, values and norms. Nevertheless, the
experience of two world wars, the globalization of mass-media communications
and trade, the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the large-scale, in-
ternational migration of workers have led – especially in middle and northern
Europe – to criticism of nationalist ideologies as well as to an influential re-
examination of the idea that societies can only be conceived as nation-states,
each with a uniform language and national culture. Processes of cultural plural-
ization, liberalization and differentiation, as well as the development of an in-
creasingly trans-national culture, both popular and educated, have made the no-
tion of autonomous national cultures less convincing. Additionally, the
assertive political claims of migrants and minorities to an independent cultural
status, the failure of the ‘melting pot’ in the USA and social developments in
Canada have led to the political ideal of a ‘multicultural society’, that is, to the
concept of a society still organized as a national state, distinguishing its citizens
legally and politically from non-citizens and instituting a nationally defined
legal system and standard language, but at the same time proclaiming linguistic,
cultural and religious diversity as permitted or even welcome (Kymlicka 1995).
These developments have far-reaching consequences for the educational
system and the schools of such states, as they change the socio-political norms
to which pedagogical theory and practice are oriented. They tend to undermine
the conception of the school as an institution meant to instill the values and
norms of a national culture, and they lend more political and pedagogical weight
to the goal of respecting cultural differences. This includes the discussion on the
right of students to be instructed in their first language (Honeyford 2003). By no
means, however, does this reduce the significance of national differences in edu-
cational practice, for the questions of what passes for ‘culture and cultures’, i.e.,
whether and in what sense education can claim to be founded on culture-neutral
knowledge and universal values, and what place regional, religious and ethnic