The Mother Tongue at School
This paper focuses on a key contradiction in nineteenth-century nationalist ideology, namely the opposition between the emphasis on the sacred status of the mother tongue, on the one hand, and the use of universal mandatory schooling as a means of homogenization, on the other. The influential philol...
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| Veröffentlicht in: | Untying the mother tongue |
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| Format: | UnknownFormat |
| Sprache: | eng |
| Veröffentlicht: |
2023
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Tag hinzufügen | Zusammenfassung: | This paper focuses on a key contradiction in nineteenth-century nationalist ideology, namely the opposition between the emphasis on the sacred status of the mother tongue, on the one hand, and the use of universal mandatory schooling as a means of homogenization, on the other. The influential philologist Jacob Grimm insisted that only people whose mother tongue was German counted as members of the German nation; the mother tongue was the key criterion of authentic belonging. Yet Grimm also realized that mandatory schooling imposed a uniform language across a wide territory, wiping out local dialects and effectively giving shape to a more linguistically unified people. He thus witnessed how modern mass instruction forged a more standardized culture at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language within families. In Grimm's writings on education, the valorization of the mother is continually disturbed by the presence of a surrogate figure, the school teacher. |
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| ISBN: | 9783965580497 9783965580480 |