Page 49 - Linguistically Diverse Educational Contexts

7. One can't hide
I teach students who are always watched by me and my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children, no private time. Transitions from class to class are short so that pupils have as much time as they need to move from class to class. Pupils are also encouraged to report on each other. The importance of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is that no one can be trusted that privacy is not justified. Children must be closely watched if you want to keep society under strict central control.
All these lessons are training that robs people of the opportunity to find their way. Over time, they have lost their original purpose of adapting the poor. Since the 1920s, the growth of school bureaucracy, as well as the many industries that profit from education as it is now, has expanded the original understanding of the institution to the point where it has now taken over middle-class students as well (Gatto, 2017). What is the result of this? Young people are indifferent to the adult world and to the future, indifferent to almost everything except toys and violence. Rich or poor, schoolchildren faced with the 21st century cannot concentrate on anything for long; they have a poor sense of past time and future time. They are distrustful of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (because we have deprived them of significant parental attention); they hate loneliness, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, shy of the unexpected, dependent on distraction. It is time to honestly face up to the fact that institutional schooling is destructive to children. No one survives completely unscathed – not even teachers – a multi-hour curriculum. What happens in school is deeply, deeply anti-educational.
Students' diverse cultural knowledge of classroom, home, and community cultures is their source of knowledge (Gonzalez et al., 2006). Multimodal and multilingual practices should be used to build curricula in different content areas and in different spaces and places, but also by different people (teachers, students, parents, local community members). Inviting students to bring culturally valuable artefacts to school allows for constructive discussion and understanding of things that matter to different communities. People learn best when learning is meaningful to them, when it is important to their lives, when they understand why they are doing something and when they can influence the process.
Critical literacy can be transformative. It can contribute to changing unjust ways of being and problematic social practices, especially when students are engaged in developing critical literacy skills from an early age and are prepared to make critical decisions about issues such as power and control, to engage in the practice of democratic citizenship, and to develop the capacity to think and act ethically. In this way, they will be better able to contribute to making the world a more socially just place.
Critical literacy of languages, on the other hand, can refer to both foreign language education, second language education (Polish as a foreign language), and mother tongue education, as every subject teacher is also a language teacher. Critical plurilingualism could contribute to the development of multilingualism, translingualism, and interculturalism among learners, through multimodal and multilingual practices used to build the curriculum in different content areas and in different spaces and places. It could contribute to developing practical and critical wisdom, to being reflective.
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