Educating the Global Citizen or the Global Consumer

Abstract

In this paper I review three models of language that have dominated language learning and teaching in the last 40 years: the textual model, the information exchange model, and the multilingual model. I analyze each one and consider how it stacks up to instances of language use in a globalized world. I then propose moving beyond the metaphors of citizens and consumers, and consider language teaching as educating denizens of a global ecology that requires sensitivity to context, political awareness, ethical answerability and a good dose of situational cunning. A few years ago I jokingly asked some American colleagues at a Graduate School of Education in Pennsylvania: ‘What are you preparing school children to be: good citizens or good consumers?’ I was surprised to hear them respond without a second of hesitation and in total seriousness: ‘Good consumers, of course. Who knows what a good citizen is?’. Some readers might find this incident a little unbelievable. Were these colleagues not joking? Were they not making fun of my naive or politically tendentious question? I have often reflected upon their response, uttered in a casual manner as we were gathered informally at a colloquium during the coffee break. As a French immigrant to the U.S., I was making a strong distinction between citizens and consumers that Anglo-Saxons might not make and thus it is possible that I misunderstood their reaction. But after second thought, it was not as surprising as it first seemed. What they were pointing out was the increasing difficulty of defining what it means to be an American citizen these days and the increasing political risks in doing so. Given the enormous divergences of opinion that the American public holds regarding basic cultural values and the many issues that divide the country, such as civil rights, freedom of speech, gun control, abortion rights, health care, immigration, right up to the interpretation of the nation’s history and the meaning of its democratic institutions, the very prospect of teaching ‘civics’ in schools has become daunting. No wonder my colleagues felt it was safer to remain on the level of consumer practice: holding corporations to standards of fair trade, equitable prices, truth in advertising, consumer protection; exercising healthy choices of what and how much to buy, and balancing your budget. But they knew that consumer education is not just about consuming products; it’s also about consuming news and information, as well as the invisible ideologies in which they are wrapped – the symbolic universe of signs and symbols that appeal less to our rationality as citizens than to our deepest desires and passions as consumers. It is This paper is a combination of three keynote speeches delivered over the last two years at various venues. The first, ‘Translating culture as epistemological challenge in global times’ was presented at the conference Language Education Across Borders’ at the University of Graz, Austria, in December 2017. The second, ‘The politics of culture in foreign language education’ was presented at the 7th Liberal Arts international conference Liberal Arts in the Global Age at the Texas A&M University in Doha, Qatar, in March 2019. The third, ‘Educating global citizens or global consumers?’ was presented at the conference Global Citizenship and Foreign Language Education at the University of Munich, Germany, in March 2019. I wish to thank Sarah Mercer and Sabine Schmölzer-Eibinger in Graz, Aymen Elsheikh in Doha, and Christiane Lütge in Munich for their kind invitation to present at their respective institutions. © Cambridge University Press 2019 Language Teaching (2019), 1–15 doi:10.1017/S0261444819000363 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444819000363 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.70.40.11, on 17 Feb 2020 at 17:12:25, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at also about consuming with critical discernment the new social media that are facilitating but also threatening our democratic dialogue. Hearing my colleagues’ response to my simple question, I suddenly realized how old-fashioned I was in even asking the question and how I had put my finger on a major challenge of our times. What form should citizenship take in a global economic order that requires less an obedience to state institutional laws and regulations in a participatory democracy than an embrace of the individual responsibility required in a global neoliberal economy? While my colleagues seemed to have abandoned all hope that the schools could help strengthen the institutional structures necessary for a national citizen’s ‘pursuit of happiness’, they seemed to be counting on individuals’ entrepreneurial spirit to achieve a global consumer’s ‘pursuit of success’. But what does success mean? If by becoming ‘good consumers’ school children learn how to better consume brands and logos, and to distinguish real news from fake news, are they not at the same time being manipulated by mediatic forces and a digital technology far beyond their control? As language educators are exhorted to focus less on linguistic form and to focus more on meaning, they quickly come to realize that the global ‘traffic in meaning’ has become even more complex and unpredictable than what Marie Louise Pratt designated by that term 20 years ago (Pratt, 2002), i.e., the cultural translation that goes on in intercultural interactions and transactions. The proliferation of meanings that politicians and administrators have tried to harness under the names of diversity and inclusion, have not taken into account the need to respect our fundamental differences in values, knowledge, and social status (Bhabha, 1994; Stewart 2017; Kramsch & Hua, 2019; Morton, 2019). In this paper, I want to trace the development of second/foreign language education from training the future citizen to training the future consumer and the issues raised by these two orientations that coexist today in a global economy. In each case, I discuss a concrete incident that highlights the challenges posed by globalization for the education of citizens, consumers, and ecological denizens. These incidents will be taken from instances of English language learning during study abroad in the U.S. (Incident 1) and of English literacy teaching in Germany (Incident 2). Although they both feature cases of learning to use English as a foreign language, they offer a picture that is somewhat different from the traditional ‘beginning foreign language class’ conducted in schools and colleges. I finally consider a new way of conceiving of language education for the denizens of a global multilingual ecology. Language education for future national citizens – the textual model In a stable society held together by national institutions and a bureaucratic apparatus, it makes sense to see the teaching of foreign languages, like any other subject in a school’s curriculum, as preparing pupils to become well-rounded citizens, aware and accepting of their place in the social hierarchy, appreciative of their own language, culture, and values, dutifully attentive to the letter of the law, and respectful of historical traditions. This view is reflected in the way some educational systems conceive of language, language learning, teachers, and learners. Language. In this institutional perspective, language is seen as an historical artifact transmitted through written texts. Form, i.e., penmanship, spelling, grammatical and lexical accuracy are as important as meaning for the exact documentation of events and the preservation of legal truths. In language education, primacy is given to the written word, captured in such bureaucratic products as encyclopedias, reference grammars and dictionaries. In this focus on language (small and capital ‘L’), language competence is seen as philological, historical, textual competence. This view of language as ‘text’ to be mastered and controlled is seen in some parts of the world as outdated but it has not disappeared, even though it takes different forms. While the French explication de textes encapsulated the essence of such a structural, exegetic approach to literary texts, the memorization of conversational gambits and other formulaic utterances in the use of communication strategies reflects such an approach for the development of oral competence. 2 Claire Kramsch https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444819000363 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.70.40.11, on 17 Feb 2020 at 17:12:25, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at Translations and multiple-choice tests assess the learner’s ability to manipulate linguistic structures and the generic features of texts. Language learning. The institutional tradition teaches the respect of texts and their authors. Language learning is seen as taking place along three dimensions: historical, geographical, and moral. Because texts are seen as repositories of unquestioned historical wisdom, foreign language texts are dictated, transcribed, copied, and committed to memory. By learning a foreign language, learners enter not only a place on the map, but a historical speech community; they internalize this community’s textual genres: the academic essay, the registration form, the job application, the statement of purpose, are all genres of success for the future national citizen. Language learning is also viewed as a dialogue with linguistic systems from other geographical areas of the globe in order to better appreciate one’s own. The search for equivalences from one language to another is a search for the comparability of symbols to capture a reality that one assumes to be translatable across languages. The French educational system still values translation as a pedagogic exercise, into and from the target language (thèmes and versions) to teach foreign languages. Translation exerc