The Future of Education

The present paper offers a multidisciplinary insight into a possible field of cooperation between educational studies and linguistics. As it is estimated that half of the worlds’ roughly 7,000 languages will not make it to the 22^nd century, the documentation  and conservation of endangered languages and spreading knowledge about them are among the most important issues for contemporary linguistics. Crystal (2011) [1] argues that school curricula could become a scene of interaction between linguists and the general public so that awareness of language diversity and endangerment among the latter group is raised. The findings of research conducted in the scope of the Innovative Networking in Infrastructure for Endangered Languages project (INNET) are that there is both room and need for topics related to endangered languages in European secondary schools. From 2011 to 2014, the project examined secondary school curricula of four European countries: Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Poland and interacted with school communities  to look for ways through which language endangerment-related topics could be introduced to secondary schools. Subsequently, a set of multi-media supported materials available on-line was created for school use.  As it turns out, however, the prospects that these materials will actually be used by teachers and students vary considerably in these four countries. Europe is uniform in terms of language attitudes, but it constitutes a mosaic composition of different patterns of social organisation and everyday multilingual realities. While e.g. in the Netherlands classrooms rarely consist of  students sharing common ethnic and linguistic backgrounds (cf. Odé 2009) [2], Poland is linguistically very homogenous and has not experienced a fresh dose of multilingualism introduced by immigrants. What is more, in post-communist countries teachers are assigned a considerably different societal role than their colleagues in Western Europe and face different challenges in their day-to-day work. Finally, the organization of school systems across European countries differ as EU recommendations allow for flexibility in ways member states implement European educational goals. Therefore, European school curricula as means of interaction between linguists and non-linguists are both promising and challenging. The paper at hand is offers a linguists’ perspective on these issues and aims at providing a systematic overview of factors touching upon disciplines of linguistics and education which need to be taken into consideration if linguists are to successfully bring their message across to European societies.