Q&A: A place for language and culture in secondary education

What do you think about this decision?

Agriculture and horticulture, care and welfare, and Stem subjects have all been earmarked as study domains, but there is no equivalent for language and culture. I find that an unfortunate decision. We live in the 21st century, which is often called an information and communication society, one that makes ever more complex demands on our linguistic and cultural competences.

Is it possible the government thinks these competences are too important to be isolated?

I hope so. It’s true that linguistic and cultural competences are crucial for everyone in today’s job market and in everyone’s societal and personal life. So it’s important that all students in the second and third grade improve their language and culture skills. I don’t doubt that.

In fact, it would be fairly easy to integrate these skills in all eight proposed domains. Students have to learn to deal with written and digital information in a critical way, whether they’re studying engineering, farming or nursing. They also need to learn to report in a clear and coherent manner, and discuss and debate with style. Our ambition has to be to transform domain-orientated education into a system that thoroughly develops language.

What about students who are passionate about language and culture itself?

That’s the challenge: offering deeper linguistic and cultural skills to those students. We should make sure that we don’t deny opportunities to those who have the ambition to become a journalist, an author, a language teacher, a cultural worker or even a media specialist. I think these students deserve to be taught language and culture on a higher level than the ones in the eight proposed study domains. So I still want to see an extra ninth domain where language and culture are the focus.