Home – Home – Jornals – "Philosophy of Education" 2015 number 6

The article is devoted to the study of social practices that enable the continuity of constantly changing constructed nations in the environment of free access to varied cultural markers in the modern world. The author observes these processes on the case of state language education. The education is employed by elites as a means of code unification to broadcast the collective narrative effectively. The development of a language into a code used for education and official documents produces language practices that an individual utilizes in social communication. These language practices are considerably predetermined by the principle of belonging that characterizes a given society. In the modern world the field of possible social experiences is unprecedentedly wide compared to any preceding epochs, and state language education becomes one of the means to provide some common social experience for a wide range of members of a national community who do not physically interact with each other. As national identities exist as dynamic comparison of identification and self-identification by an individual, we may describe the role of state language education as continuous supply of situations that evoke this comparison. The concept of a multiethnic civic national community is based on the assumption that linguistic personalities are changeable. State language education as a process transforms the linguistic identity of an individual through encouraging the individual to perceive his/her linguistic identity in a more meaningful and symbolically marked way. The system of teaching the state language also promotes similarity of cultural markers for members of one political community.