Page 328 - Handbooks of Applied Linguistics Communication Competence Language and Communication Problems Practical Solutions

306 Albert Scherr

cultures can have in the educational program – these questions currently receive
widely differing answers on political stages and in the resulting pedagogical dis-
courses.
The following sections present some of the ways in which the schools and
educational systems of three countries are approaching the treatment of culture
and cultural differences. The interconnections of social policy, the reproduction
of culture, and education will be discussed with reference to the educational sys-
tems of France, Britain and Canada, along with theories of intercultural peda-
gogy. The aim will be to show that the chosen socio-political frameworks not
only have wide-reaching organizational and legal consequences, but that they
also influence concrete behavioral features of the school environments.

2. Education, reproduction of culture and multiculturalism

As social institutions, schools are charged with ensuring that all citizens acquire
a common language as well as the knowledge, behavior patterns, value orien-
tations and norms that are felt to be indispensable for life in their society. Uni-
versally mandatory schooling is an expression of this duty. Schooling thus is
based, for one, on assumptions about the knowledge and skills necessary to
meet the demands of industry and political life. Additionally, pedagogical the-
ory and practice adopt assumptions about which skills, knowledge, moral and
political convictions best fulfill current educational ideals. Now, pedagogically
significant ideas about personality development and about worthwhile knowl-
edge and skills are not autonomously derived from pedagogical theory, as has
been repeatedly shown since the classic studies of Emile Durkheim (1922) and
Siegfried Bernfeld (1973). Rather, they are expressions of socially dominant
structures, models and norms, or of critical reactions to these in pedagogical
theory and discourse. Accordingly, educational sociology regards the practice
of schools as a constitutive element of societal reproduction, in the sense of its
transmitting socially dominant values, norms and behavioral tendencies. Cur-
rently prominent theories and studies focus not only on the forms and content
consciously known to their practitioners, but also on those structures and prac-
tices in which social demands reproduce themselves as self-evident and unques-
tioned background assumptions. This perspective displays educational practice
as a component in the larger system that inculcates culture, in the sense of the
restraining rules, norms, values, symbols, meanings and bodies of knowledge
upon which the culture rests. Socio-historical, sociological and pedagogical
studies have shown, furthermore, that school-induced socialization must be
examined with respect to the question of how it contributes to enforcement of a
particular social discipline and to the formation of personality structures typical
of the culture (Apple 1982; Dreeben 1970; Foucault 1979; Holzkamp 1993).