The recent report by Alan Milburn on fair entry into the professions identifies a lot of barriers to wider access. It doesn’t mention the language barrier though. Perhaps that is because languages are an invisible factor in social mobility.
All the evidence shows that learning languages at school tends to be concentrated in a narrow social range. Independent schools have no problem in maintaining language learning, but many state secondary schools are abandoning languages altogether from age 14. It appears that over half the people who enter one of the main professions went to an independent school, and therefore have a reasonable grounding in one or more languages. Perhaps there is a link here?
Not many professions have an explicit language requirement, but they do have a typical profile, and that generally involves a rounded education including a language. You might add that what languages give is a degree of personal confidence and access to a wider cultural experience that makes today’s professionals feel at ease in the international environment they inhabit. Ask the médecins sans frontières.
Tuesday, 28 July 2009
Tuesday, 21 July 2009
Stormy weather for languages
This generational economic crisis is turning out to be a stormy environment for languages in UK education. Our future is in the balance and we have two broad options.
We can batten down the hatches and ride out the storm, trusting that our place is in the higher levels of society’s hierarchy of needs. We may be neglected or forgotten when survival is threatened or when bread and butter issues predominate, but our role of cultural enrichment will once more be valued when things are calmer. At that point we will re-emerge, largely unchanged, though almost certainly smaller.
Or we can try to ride before the storm, believing that languages are important at all levels of society’s needs. They may be crucial factors in survival and have a key role to play in addressing bread and butter issues. When the storm abates we shall have changed significantly, but it may be that we have grown in the process.
Different parts of the languages community will make different choices, and many will try to combine both directions. Either way, we are going to need a lot of courage and imagination over the next few years.
We can batten down the hatches and ride out the storm, trusting that our place is in the higher levels of society’s hierarchy of needs. We may be neglected or forgotten when survival is threatened or when bread and butter issues predominate, but our role of cultural enrichment will once more be valued when things are calmer. At that point we will re-emerge, largely unchanged, though almost certainly smaller.
Or we can try to ride before the storm, believing that languages are important at all levels of society’s needs. They may be crucial factors in survival and have a key role to play in addressing bread and butter issues. When the storm abates we shall have changed significantly, but it may be that we have grown in the process.
Different parts of the languages community will make different choices, and many will try to combine both directions. Either way, we are going to need a lot of courage and imagination over the next few years.
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