The Education of Linguistic and Cultural Minorities in the OECD Countries

Abstract

This book provides an overview of the principles used by policy makers in western industrialized countries as they seek to meet the educational needs of cultural and linguistic minorities as diverse as Australian aboriginal peoples, resident foreign workers in Western Europe and Francophone minorities in Canadian provinces. This is a synthesis of information gathered in more than 30 national case studies and consultants' reports prepared for an OECD-sponsored study entitled: Finance, Organisation and Governance of Education for Special Populations. Drawing on this data, the author shows that current policies fit within a relatively simple framework of development by stages, each stage determined by the assumptions used in defining the educational problem to be solved. At the lower end of the scale, methods are borrowed from special education of the mentally retarded; at the upper end, the minorities are treated as equals or near equals in mature bilingual and multilingual nations such as Finland or Switzerland. The emphasis is on showing how policy makers grapple with tradeoffs to determine the best policy mix, such as between centralization and decentralization or between financial incentive schemes and direct regulation, in order to ensure adequate educational services for the minorities. The entire analytical framework is shown to fit within an integrated model linking minority aspirations, public attitudes and governmental policy responses.