The Revival of Scottish Gaelic Through Education
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The Revival of Scottish Gaelic Through Education By Michael McIn ...

Chapter 1:  The Dying Gael
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and feel in a way that is approved and sanctioned by the dominating culture.

Simulation of the Dominant

[I]nvasion, colonization, occupation and other instances of political, economic or social subordination often involve the direct imposition of a foreign language or, at the very least, distort perceptions of the value of languages and give rise to hierarchical linguistic attitudes which undermine the language loyalty of speakers; and considering that the languages of some peoples which have attained sovereignty are immersed in a process of language substitution as a result of a policy which favours the language of a former colonial or imperial power…

—UNESCO (1996, Preliminaries)

This historical overview is important, for it is in reviewing what has led up to the present that we are able to see clearly the forms, uses, and nature of language politics. As has been attested to by observers of many different peoples, a dominant culture that educates the children of a dominated culture does more than merely “educate,” or transmit value-neutral information (the myth of value-free 3 Rs, for instance). But what happens in a society whose curriculum is controlled by one group at the expense of another is that only the dominant group's story is told, while that of other group is muted. One or possibly two things happen: people who do not belong to the dominant group are induced to assimilate into, or rather simulate membership in that more powerful group and sometimes come to despise their own native group. According to Hollins (1996), C. G. Woodson wrote in The Mis-education of the Negro (1933) that such is the fate of “educated Negroes,” as demonstrated in the following quote:

[Negroes] have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools, Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African. (as cited in Hollins, 1996, p. 83)