In the summer of 1947, a modest conference was held at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), then housed at the Hotel Majestic in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris. The city had been liberated from Nazi control for three years, but the discussions resonated with themes that might have been floated at the hotel during the occupation, when it had served as headquarters of the Nazi military command in France.
‘[The] promotion of international understanding, and therefore, on a more rudimentary level, “inter-tribal” understanding is one of the guiding principles of the UN charter, and . . . a multiplicity of languages, some of them spoken and understood only by small tribal units, is a barrier to such understanding’, a preparatory meeting document stated. It continued to note ‘that certain primitive languages do not lend themselves easily to writing on account of their phonological complexity or irregularity . . . such languages cannot carry a modern (technical and scientific) educational content’. Attendees were prompted to consider whether ‘any general principles [should] be established in regard to . . . the desirability of working for a gradual elimination of smaller or more primitive languages; [and] the right method of achieving such elimination if it is desirable’.Footnote 1
The discussions at UNESCO’s 1947 ‘Meeting of Experts on Language Problems in Fundamental Education’ sit uneasily alongside the accustomed concerns of post-war internationalism: at the same moment when Raphael Lemkin was fighting at the UN Secretariat in New York to define genocide as encompassing the destruction of languages and cultures, the mechanics of such destruction were being mooted for examination at a UN specialised agency across the Atlantic.Footnote 2
Fast forward to 1951, when a second meeting was held at the Hotel Majestic. UNESCO’s ‘Meeting of Specialists on the Use of Vernacular Languages in Education’ directly refuted the eliminationist propositions made just four years earlier. ‘[We] hold that there is nothing in the structure of any language which precludes it from becoming a vehicle of modern civilization’, the meeting report read. It also clarified that schooling in two languages was not a zero-sum game – contrary to what opponents of multilingualism and multilingual instruction had contended in the preceding decades. Commencing in one language and then adding a second language would not, in fact, ‘prevent acquisition of the second language’, the 1951 meeting report asserted. It concluded: ‘It is axiomatic that the best medium for teaching a child is his mother tongue.’Footnote 3 In the span of four years, the organisation had abandoned the notion that some languages deserved to be eliminated on civilisational grounds, instead expressing qualified enthusiasm about the possibilities of bilingual education.
What had happened between these two meetings to prompt this change of heart towards the world’s languages and their role in education? What do the changes tell us about the shifting contours of internationalism in the mid-twentieth century? And, finally, how might they shape our understanding of how ideas moved amid the double reconfigurations of political decolonisation and the onset of the Cold War? This article proposes to answer these questions by tracing changing attitudes towards multilingualism and ‘mother tongues’ (especially non-European ones) from the early twentieth century through the era of political decolonisation, when UNESCO became a hub for reconsidering educational practices and channelled ideas in some surprising directions.
Scholars of language have established the mother tongue as a historically constructed category, dating to the late medieval and early modern periods in many European languages (langue maternelle, Muttersprache, lengua materna, língua materna), which in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became an instrument of ethnolinguistic nationalism.Footnote 4 Yet, as the sociolinguists Linus Salö and David Karlander have shown, the origins of a concept do not necessarily determine its subsequent political applications.Footnote 5 Nor do they determine its spatial reach, as the far-flung if contested use of European languages in colonial, postcolonial and international spaces channelled concepts like the mother tongue back and forth across Europe’s political borders. This article uncovers how UNESCO’s language conferences helped shift political and scientific opinion on what languages to use in education and how mother tongues should figure therein, at times by defying conventional geographies of knowledge production and dissemination, as, for instance, pilot bilingual experiments from the postcolonial Philippines – entailing instruction in a local ‘mother tongue’ and English – found their way, via Paris, into American bilingual education advocacy. The concept of the mother tongue twisted and at times forked to suit disparate political agendas, including in the case of bilingual education.
Attending to how language politics have intersected with geopolitics holds the potential to open new avenues in the historiography of post-war international institutions. A prominent strand of international history has focused on how power struggles contaminated the idealism of the wartime and immediate post-war periods. In the case of UNESCO, this historiography focuses on how growing Cold War tensions eviscerated its stated mission to ‘contribute to peace and security by promoting collaboration among the nations through education, science and culture’.Footnote 6 Amid an atomic arms race, the establishment of Soviet hegemony in central and eastern Europe and the outbreak of hot war on the Korean peninsula, Washington pressed the UN Security Council to intervene in Korea (Moscow was then boycotting it) and pursued red scares within not only the federal bureaucracy but also the international civil service.Footnote 7 The Soviet Union, meanwhile, effected the withdrawal of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary from UNESCO in 1952 and boycotted the organisation until after Stalin’s death.Footnote 8 This scholarship implies that the location of many UN ‘soft power’ agencies in Europe was immaterial when decision-making was effectively concentrated in Washington and Moscow. The intellectual and cultural ramifications of this essentially diplomatic story are clear: ideas are subordinate to prerogatives of state(s).
There is much that is compelling in this broad-brush account. There is also much to question, methodologically as well as empirically, in metanarratives of top-down domination that embed social and cultural assumptions in the absence of social or cultural reflection.Footnote 9 Namely, how did state interests, particularly superpower interests, relate to the movement of ideas and information and the emergence of affinities across borders and in international spaces – through a kind of panoptic process of monitoring and control; or in a spottier, more haphazard fashion? In more Foucauldian terms: is power knowledge, or are they entangled but distinct?
Transnational historians have attuned us to elements of surprise and contingency in episodes of border-crossing and exchange. Glenda Sluga has called for a ‘transnational history of international institutions’ that attends to the ‘crooked lines connecting East and West, North and South’. Similarly, Sandrine Kott has proposed a ‘social history of international organisations’ that moves beyond ‘grand plenary conferences, moments which favoured national antagonisms’ to examine the everyday interactions and lower-profile gatherings that they housed, and the ‘epistemic communities that [coalesced]’ as a result.Footnote 10 In the adjacent field of language history, scholars have likewise thought dialectically about the relationship between policies and practices. Unravelling the contingent emergence of global English, for instance, Michael Gordin has argued that knowledge and power are ‘bedfellows . . . not twins’.Footnote 11
Yet these bodies of scholarship remain surprisingly little integrated. Historians have seldom studied international organisations as a nexus of languages and ideas about language. When they do, it has most often been through the framework of colliding state interests. For instance, Chloé Maurel’s work on UNESCO has revealed linguistic tensions that coexisted with the East–West fissures more familiar to the English-language historiography of the early Cold War, mapping contestations between the ‘clan Anglo-Saxon’ of Anglophone member states and the ‘clan Latin’, a coalition led by France that favoured the French language.Footnote 12 Alongside these essentially diplomatic skirmishes, though, lie other forms of interaction and inquiry, the ‘epistemic communities’ formed by UNESCO’s civil servants and invited experts. By bringing the new transnational history of international organisations into conversation with work on linguistics and language history, this article illuminates how international shifts such as political decolonisation intersected with flux and change in debates about language and languages in education.Footnote 13 This approach also expands scholarship in linguistics, which heretofore has tended to pay more attention to the ‘mother tongue’ in nationalist discourses than to the concept’s convoluted passage through international institutions and into arguably more emancipatory, multilingual forms of education.Footnote 14
The first part of the article shows the deep imprint of imperialism on post-war language meetings at UNESCO. For imperial elites, multilingual populations educated in both mother tongues and European languages were not a broad social desideratum; they were a political and cultural threat. These elites’ goal was to curb this putatively destabilising demographic by either eliminating other languages (the assimilationist solution) or confining most subjects to instruction in non-European tongues. The discussions at UNESCO’s 1947 meeting reflected this imperial inheritance, framing language education as a means of engineering social and political control.
The second part of the article examines how widening participation in the international arena after 1945 began to foster more positive interpretations of multilingualism and bilingual education. Mingling with colonial hands in post-war Paris were figures like the Filipino educational expert and UNESCO official Pedro Orata, who highlighted the success of bilingual education experiments in the newly independent Philippines. While Orata drew on an existing repertoire of concepts, he deployed them differently, mobilising the idea of the mother tongue to support multilingualism rather than to contain or eliminate it. These experimental findings from the Philippines would be disseminated in UNESCO publications in the 1950s and 1960s. In parallel, UNESCO amplified research from the fields of neurology and psychology that likewise bolstered the case for education in more than one language.
The article’s final section reveals the overlooked impact of UNESCO’s transformed internationalism upon American discussions of language education in the 1950s and 1960s. Even as the logic of Cold War competition propelled superpower resources and expertise outward, to both Europe and the Global South – and even as domestic American xenophobes mobilised Cold War anti-communism in an effort to restrict influences from both Europe and the Global South – this case study demonstrates that exchange was never a one-way street: American advocates of bilingual education drew on examples from the decolonising and developing worlds and leveraged the imprimatur of Paris in order to influence domestic attitudes and policy, in a process that culminated in the US Bilingual Education Act of 1968 (the BEA), the first federal legislation explicitly intended to support English-language learners in American schools.Footnote 15
By following some of the twisting and at times forked paths of the ‘mother tongue’ across the twentieth century – between European metropoles and colonial West Africa; from the postcolonial Philippines through Paris to the United States– the article shows how the ‘mother tongue’ transformed from a bedrock concept in monolingual nationalisms and a persistent source of imperial anxiety before 1945 into an ingredient in post-war arguments for multilingualism and bilingual education.
Multilingualism as Threat in the Late Colonial Era
UNESCO’s early intellectual history was marked by imperialism. Its first director-general, the British scientist and public intellectual Julian Huxley, cut a contradictory figure. A biologist by training and a vocal opponent of Nazi race science in the 1930s, after the war Huxley remained a believer in population engineering through sterilisation – an ‘anti-racist’ by the standards of the day who embraced genetic theories of racial (and class) difference. As Glenda Sluga notes, Huxley’s ‘general faith in evolutionary progress pulsed through the early years of UNESCO’.Footnote 16 The propositions floated at the 1947 Meeting of Experts on Language Problems in Fundamental Education regarding the elimination of ‘smaller or more primitive languages’, though unsigned, had a distinctly Huxleyan flavour.Footnote 17
We might view proposals to eliminate languages as one end of a continuum of governing practices intended to hierarchise and manage linguistically marked subject populations.Footnote 18 These practices reflected the entanglement of imperialism and nationalism. Language diversity outside of Europe had formed an important backdrop for the development of the core nationalist tenet that nations comprised homogenous linguistic communities. The eighteenth-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, the father of linguistic nationalism par excellence, not only worked in the shadow of French and Russian continental expansionism but was also deeply concerned about the ways European imperialism in the Americas and elsewhere threatened to disrupt the natural order of cultural difference, itself produced and transmitted by language. ‘Nothing appears so directly opposite to the ends of government as the unnatural enlargement of states, the wild mixture of various races and various nations under one sceptre’, Herder wrote in Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. A polyglot who had studied French, Spanish, Italian, English, Latvian and Gaelic as well as Greek, Hebrew and Latin, Herder helped naturalise the notion that the Muttersprache was the vessel of national cultures. Recent scholarship has grappled with Herder’s anti-colonialism and pluralist sensibility alongside the ways his thinking undergirded the development of repressive, monolingual nationalisms.Footnote 19 Not for the last time, the idea of the mother tongue had seemingly contradictory implications.
Within Europe, governing practices associated with nationalism could also resemble a kind of internal colonialism, designed to assimilate non-native speakers to the nation or civilisation. In France, the revolutionary Abbé Grégoire had argued in 1794 for the suppression of regional languages like Breton, Occitan and Basque in order to unify the new republic. The imposition of Parisian French on the provinces remained an ongoing project of state under the Third Republic, with Paris proceeding on the grounds that Breton speakers, for instance, could eventually become French speakers, and thereby exemplary standard-bearers of French civilisation. Similarly, in late nineteenth-century Sweden, institutions of state, particularly schools, pressured a minority of Finnish speakers to assimilate to the dominant Swedish-language culture.Footnote 20
But, increasingly by the turn of the twentieth century, civilisational differentiation tended to cut along the more immutable lines of biologically understood racial categories. From the European powers in Africa to the United States in the Philippines to the Nazis in continental Europe, imperial elites feared mixing across racial lines on the grounds that ‘miscegenation’ (a word that first appeared in English in 1863) would diminish the conquerors’ racial stock.Footnote 21 Imperial racialisation also shaped politics in the metropoles. In both France and the United States, for instance, overseas expansion unfurled alongside efforts to exclude colonial migrants, coded as non-white and therefore non-assimilable, from full citizenship and democratic participation.Footnote 22
Multilingualism – a form of linguistic mixing or multiplicity, often across reified social divisions such as race or ethnicity – was unsurprisingly also often perceived as a threat, if one that has received less attention from historians. The linguist Christopher Hutton notes that Hitler considered language a ‘point of vulnerability’ because ‘it [provided] a bridge to racial mixing’, yielding assimilated Jews and people of Jewish ancestry who spoke fluent German. These groups confounded the Nazis’ hoped-for symmetry between the German language and the German Volk, understood as a racial group.Footnote 23 Multilingualism also produced anxieties in contexts characterised more by hierarchisation than elimination. Governments since ancient times have depended on translators who can move between linguistic worlds; but they have often been suspected of disloyalty (the Italian expression traduttore, traditore captures this well: ‘translator, traitor’).Footnote 24 By the early twentieth century, the question of what languages to deploy in education became pertinent not only to training a small, multilingual elite but also to educating broader swaths of societies – in colonial settings often due to pressure from below for greater access to literacy.Footnote 25
One approach to this question was what I have elsewhere called ‘linguistic containment’.Footnote 26 In the first decades of the twentieth century, influential European elites sought to constrain social and political change in colonised territories by elevating education in non-European mother tongues over education in European languages – containing the latter, in effect. Linguistic containment was pursued in settings as disparate as British Malaya and German West Africa, though it may have been particularly attractive to colonial policymakers in sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote 27 Prior to 1914, authorities in German colonial Togo had attempted to suppress the teaching of English to Africans at mission schools, in spite of robust demand (English was already established as a vehicular language in West Africa at the time of German colonisation). As Angela Zimmerman explains, ‘In part to work against the political threat that the colonial state perceived in African literacy in English, the North German Mission, the oldest Christian mission in Togo and the one closest to the German government, began promoting a unified Ewe identity in their educational and missionary work’.Footnote 28
After the First World War, linguistic containment found its foremost theoretician in Frederick Lugard, erstwhile governor of British Nigeria and influential member of the League of Nations Permanent Mandates Commission. Lugard equated European-language education with the emergence of anti-colonial nationalism and instead espoused limiting education in English in the war-expanded footprint of British Africa. It was hoped that, by conducting elementary education in African languages, and by limiting access to European languages at the secondary level, educational institutions could help contain social and political disruption in the United Kingdom’s African colonies. In the 1920s, two influential British advisory bodies, the East Africa Commission and the Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa (which Lugard sat on, and which Julian Huxley would also become involved in), recommended as much.Footnote 29
More surprisingly, given the dichotomy of British ‘indirect rule’ versus French assimilationism that Lugard himself promoted, contemporaneous policies in French West Africa also sought to circumscribe colonial subjects’ access to education. From 1914 onward in the coastal Quatres communes of Senegal, the mother tongue was used as a criterion to limit, and not to expand, access to ‘European classes’ on par with metropolitan standards: students whose parents spoke French at home – that is, white students and possibly a small number of mixed-race students – passed through the mother-tongue filter, while a larger number of Black students were blocked.Footnote 30
An alternative approach to the problem of colonial multilingualism was to spread European tongues as instruments of modernisation, much as the French political class was doing with French in France. This approach rested on cultural, rather than biological (or rather than exclusively biological), differentiation, and the belief that ‘less developed’ peoples could in fact be ‘civilised’ under the proper tutelage. Before 1945, the United States had tested this approach in colonial acquisitions such as the Philippines. In the eyes of modernising elites like David P. Barrows, superintendent for education in the Philippines from 1903 to 1909, the provision of English-language education to a broad range of colonial subjects proved the superiority of US rule over despotic Spanish colonialism.Footnote 31 Within the continental United States, meanwhile, faith in the modernising capacity of English fuelled assimilationist policies targeting minoritised language groups, including Indigenous Americans. Increasingly, English-only education paved over a tapestry of bilingual formats, previously common in the Hispanophone Southwest, among other places.Footnote 32 Through the inter-war period, in the United States, assimilationist policies were bolstered by scientific conclusions regarding the danger of educating children in two languages at once, which was thought to cause developmental delays.Footnote 33
Particularly in its application to the Indigenous children in North America and Australia who were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to English-only boarding schools, assimilationism intersected with a third approach to linguistic diversity: to eliminate it.Footnote 34 The key impulse underlying proposals to eliminate languages was anxiety, whether around maintaining existing linguistic and cultural hierarchies or driven by more hardline biological fears of racial mixing (often a mélange of the two). Hutton explains that for Nazi linguists, part of the danger of Jewish people was that they kept their holy language apart from the vernaculars they spoke and were perceived to ‘lack a sense of loyalty to their mother-tongue’; they ‘were therefore regarded as having an “unnatural” relationship to language’.Footnote 35 The important thing to note here is that, at both poles of imperial language policy-making – linguistic containment, which elevated mother tongues, and linguistic eliminationism, which sought to eradicate languages – genuinely multilingual subject populations were constructed as a political problem. So the same 1947 UNESCO meeting agenda that broached the question of whether ‘smaller or more primitive languages’ should be eradicated could also ask participants to weigh the principle that ‘early education must inevitably be carried out in the mother-tongue’, which ‘enshrines the spirit of a people’.Footnote 36
The consonance between linguistic containment and eliminationist thinking is evident in the career of the German Africanist Diedrich Hermann Westermann. A gifted linguist and an evangelical Protestant whose activities prior to the First World War had intersected with the work of German Lutheran missions in Africa, Westermann enjoyed continuing relevance after the loss of Germany’s colonies through connections to the British policy and research communities, which Peter Kallaway notes were eager to ‘take advantage of German expertise in the field’. As an advisor to the British Colonial Office in the 1920s and early 1930s, Westermann advocated for education in the vernacular and supported Frederick Lugard’s notion of indirect rule.Footnote 37 Then, as the political scene changed from 1933 on, Westermann pivoted, developing a ‘close association with the Nazis from the mid-1930s’. He helped envision a post-war renaissance of German colonial power that was to reinforce racial and linguistic boundaries in Africa.Footnote 38
The conceptualisation of the mother tongue in Romantic terms at UNESCO’s 1947 meeting was thus compatible with calls to eliminate some languages. In fact, in asserting at that meeting that ‘the mother tongue enshrines the spirit of a people’, UNESCO paraphrased a line from Frederick Lugard’s 1925 article ‘Education in Tropical Africa’, which Lugard himself had credited to Westermann: ‘British policy . . . believes with Professor Westermann that “the native language is the expression of the soul of a people”’.Footnote 39 This Herderian conception of an isomorphism between language and ethnopolitical belonging would persist in some postcolonial nationalist policy-making, as we shall see below.
A related idea about mother-tongue instruction would prove more ambiguous vis-à-vis multilingualism. This was the argument that, pedagogically, a child’s first language was the best initial medium of instruction.Footnote 40 It could, of course, be mobilised by advocates of colonial linguistic containment. As undersecretary of state for the colonies William Ormsby-Gore told the British House of Commons in 1929, it was ‘essential that the children should begin their learning in their mother tongue. You cannot begin to teach a child the use of words unless you do it in the tongue in which it [sic] has first learned to think.’ Ormsby-Gore had spearheaded the Colonial Office’s 1925 East Africa Commission and 1927 Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa.Footnote 41
But, after 1945, the idea that the mother tongue was the most effective medium in the first few years of schooling would also be mobilised in experimental bilingual programmes, to help break apart the fusion of language and racial/national belonging in areas where students’ first languages did not align with national or hegemonic languages. UNESCO would prove integral to incubating this new kind of thinking about the role of the mother tongue in education.
UNESCO and the Evolving Politics and Science of Multilingualism
The internationalisation of intellectual exchange was not a post-1945 phenomenon. During the inter-war period, the Intellectual Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (Commission Internationale de la Coopération Intellectuelle, or CICI) and the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, or IICI) had fostered dialogue between leading thinkers and scholars under the auspices of the League of Nations. The French government funded the IICI, which was based in Paris. Historian Jean-Jacques Renoliet has referred to these League institutions as a ‘forgotten UNESCO’.Footnote 42 Meanwhile, in Geneva, the International Bureau of Education (IBE) was established, existing first as a federation of civic associations and then, from 1929 onward, as an intergovernmental body dedicated to gathering documentation on education from around the world. The pre-eminence of European members like France and Switzerland in the League made Paris and Geneva significant sites of international knowledge exchange before the Second World War.
The appeal of international fora to less powerful states, including states outside Europe, also predated 1945. The League’s intellectual and educational bodies were more open to non-western members than more straightforwardly imperialist ones such as the Permanent Mandates Commission. At the CICI, Europeans mingled with intellectuals from India, China, Japan and Brazil, among other places. Similarly, Egypt and Ecuador numbered among the IBE’s first six members.Footnote 43 From the mid- through the late 1930s, the IBE produced educational surveys and documentation that involved information from ‘almost all the so-called sovereign countries that maintained diplomatic relations’, including nineteen from Latin America, China and Japan, as well as India, a colony but also a League member.Footnote 44
Yet even these relatively democratised inter-war institutions remained in thrall to what Daniel Laqua calls ‘thinking in civilizations’. The IICI’s director from 1926 to 1930, Frenchman Julien Luchaire, was leery of getting too involved in efforts to combat essentialist notions of race. Laqua concludes that ‘despite its professed universalism, [inter-war] intellectual cooperation implied clear hierarchies’ around matters pertaining to race and empire.Footnote 45 In the surveys it began in 1934, the IBE conspicuously avoided addressing the matter of languages of instruction in schools, in spite of their centrality to policy-making in many member states. In their institutional history of the IBE, Rita Hofstetter and Bernard Schneuwly speculate that this may have been to avoid thorny political questions surrounding the use of the mother tongue. They also note that, after the Second World War, UNESCO ‘took the lead on this issue’.Footnote 46
UNESCO’s tackling of these issues reflected how the international arena itself was transforming during the early post-war period. The elitist and Eurocentric inheritance it had received from the IICI – one early scholarly collaborator saw UNESCO as a vehicle for reestablishing Latin as a lingua franca – would be vigorously challenged.Footnote 47 In particular, in the late 1940s, the gathering wave of political decolonisation and the ascension of new member states at the United Nations were beginning to empower figures from Asia and the Middle East to defend not only their interests but also their cultures and languages before the international community.Footnote 48
Historians have demonstrated how this transformation affected post-war social-scientific work on race. For instance, Perrin Selcer has shown how a diversified cast of experts shaped UNESCO’s landmark 1950 statement on race, which rejected the notion of biological difference between races and was widely heralded by anti-racist scholars and civil rights activists. As recently as the 1930s, the Jewish anthropologists Franz Boas and Harry Shapiro had found it necessary to find a WASP ‘front man’ for their disciplinary statement on anti-racism because, as Jews, their objectivity was considered suspect. By contrast, the panel behind UNESCO’s 1950 statement featured, among others, the French Jewish anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Black American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, the Brazilian sociologist Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto and the Bengali writer and politician Humayun Kabir. ‘[The] national and racial representativeness of the international scientific community was now an issue – inclusivity, as well as exclusivity, would increasingly become a mark of credibility’, writes Selcer.Footnote 49
Less has been written about international discussions of language instruction and languages in education during the same period. This is surprising, given how debates about race in anthropology and psychology were closely intertwined with linguistics and assumptions about language.Footnote 50 Yet the post-war expansion of the international arena was also visible, in microcosm, in the lists of attendees at UNESCO’s 1947 and 1951 language meetings. The 1947 meeting where eliminating ‘smaller’ languages was discussed gathered six individuals based in western Europe, one British citizen based in the United States, one representative from Czechoslovakia and one sociologist from Guatemala. Asia and Africa were covered, so to speak, by an ex-official from the Belgian Congo, a Dutch specialist on Islam and a ‘former representative of [the] Orthological Institute’ in India. (One UNESCO Secretariat representative from China and an observer from Brazil also attended.)Footnote 51 By 1951, UNESCO was casting its net more broadly: cheek-by-jowl with representatives from the British Colonial Office and the Belgian Ministère des colonies were figures from the postcolonial Philippines, India and Indonesia. In addition, the publication that resulted from the 1951 meeting, The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education (1953), contained contributions from Egypt and Mexico.Footnote 52
Support for education in non-European languages was not prima facie progressive. As we have seen, late colonial administrators had often backed mother-tongue-medium instruction on the grounds that education in European languages would politicise their subjects. Nor did the diversification of international politics after 1945 automatically yield a human rights–oriented approach to language or an interest in multilingualism. For instance, authorities in postcolonial Malaysia would deem Malay the ‘sole national and official language’ (and ‘“soul of the nation“‘) and would construct multilingualism as a threat to the nation-state, marginalising not only English – tarred with the legacy of colonialism – but also Malaysia’s sizeable Chinese, Tamil and other language communities.Footnote 53 Similarly exemplifying this exclusionary strain of postcolonial nationalism, the Indonesian case study in the UNESCO report The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education read as a defence of Bahasa Indonesia as the country’s official language, at the expense of the archipelago’s hundreds of other languages.Footnote 54 But the chapter on the Philippines, by Pedro Orata, stood out in promoting vernacular instruction not only on the basis of its contribution to national development but also on that of students’ own learning experiences.
Orata was a Filipino educator and policymaker then based at the UNESCO Secretariat in Paris, where, as a programme specialist, he worked to map the worldwide educational landscape, drawing on data from East, West, South and North that expanded upon the IBE’s inter-war surveys.Footnote 55 But Orata was no quant. He had been deeply involved in progressive education circles for decades, having completed a PhD at Ohio State University in the 1920s. Long a critic of ‘mechanistic’ approaches to learning that treated the student like an ‘automaton’, Orata viewed education normatively, as a pathway to self-sufficiency and democratic citizenship.Footnote 56 Bilingual education had been happening in the Philippines since the Second World War, he wrote in his chapter for The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education, going on to describe experiments in both simultaneous bilingual instruction and in staggered bilingual instruction (with the first language taught first and English introduced slightly later). The results of a bilingual instruction pilot project in Iloilo province, begun in July 1948, were especially striking. Not only did students taught for the first two years in their first language and then in English perform better than students taught from the outset in English, but the former group also ‘[had] a greater desire to attend school’ and a ‘[greater] love for reading and writing’.Footnote 57
Orata stopped short of defending vernacular or bilingual education as a human right, in contrast to more full-throated defences of learners’ rights that would emanate from some of his compatriots. Orata’s meliorism was entangled with empire in complex ways: in the 1930s, during the ‘Indian New Deal’, he had worked for the US Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) as principal of a day school on a South Dakota reservation, where his goals to encourage ‘economic independence’ and ‘self-government’ – however progressive when viewed in the longer sweep of federal policy towards Indigenous Americans – had been defined by Washington and not by the reservation’s residents.Footnote 58 And his chapter for the 1953 UNESCO volume was, like the others, set within an instrumental framework that asked how language education could serve national development. Orata’s professional path from a colonial to a postcolonial development institution was not unusual. Education scholars have noted that he was not the only BIA veteran at UNESCO: Willard Beatty, whom Orata had worked under in the 1930s, landed in Paris in the early 1950s to become deputy director of education.Footnote 59
Nevertheless, the attention that Orata paid to the social and emotional life of learners stood out against the top-down cultural nationalism of other chapters in The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education. The languages used in the experiments Orata described were not the Philippines’ new national language, Tagalog – a ‘foreign language to over 70 per cent of the Filipino people’, he clarified – but rather Ilocano, Cebuano and Hiligaynon. He also refuted the anxieties emanating from Washington that English was being displaced by Tagalog in the postcolonial Philippines. These sensitivities to local context and learner motivation – consistent with the longer arc of his career, both within and without UNESCO – would make Orata’s chapter a useful reference point for future advocates of bilingual education, as we will see.Footnote 60
In parallel to the changing politics of language and to pilot bilingual programmes by various educators, opinion on bilingualism among university-based psychologists and neurologists was also shifting.Footnote 61 Canada, especially Montreal, was an important hub for work on early childhood language learning and bilingual education. In 1953, the McGill University neuroscientist Wilder Penfield published an important article on the plasticity of young brains that suggested the advantages of early language learning.Footnote 62 Then, in 1961, Elizabeth Peal (later, Elizabeth Anisfeld) completed a doctorate in psychology at McGill on the relationship between bilingualism and intelligence, published a year later in article form with her advisor, McGill psycholinguist Wallace Lambert. Their findings marked a watershed in the field: examining a group of Montreal ten-year-olds receiving bilingual instruction in French and English, Peal and Lambert concluded that, when socio-economic variables were controlled for, completely bilingual students scored higher on intelligence tests than their monolingual peers.Footnote 63
Soon after they were published, UNESCO amplified these findings. In his chapter resulting from its 1953 Ceylon conference, the American educator Theodore Andersson cited Penfield’s work (see below for further discussion).Footnote 64 And, as a 1962 UNESCO conference on early language learning put it, referencing Peal and Lambert’s recent article, ‘The psychology of bilingualism . . . is reassuring with regard to the effect of bilingualism on mental development.’Footnote 65
The shift from negative to neutral or even positive views of bilingual education and multilingualism in the post-war decades was far from linear or uncontested. At the same moment, some researchers continued to pursue the thesis that bilingualism delayed child language development. One popular American child psychology textbook from 1952 asserted that ‘[there] can be no doubt that the child reared in a bilingual environment is handicapped in his language growth. One can debate the issue as to whether speech facility in two languages is worth the consequent retardation in the common language of the realm.’Footnote 66 UNESCO was part of a larger field of debate over bilingualism and language education. In February 1953, Penfield had presented his findings at an American Academy of Arts and Sciences meeting in Boston; they were reprinted later that year in the organisation’s proceedings.Footnote 67 A few years later, in 1956, the American Modern Language Association (MLA) convened a panel including Penfield. The panel arrived at the consensus that bilingual education should begin between ages four and eight.Footnote 68
But if UNESCO was not the only populariser of positive findings on bilingualism, this research was entangled with the kind of one-world internationalism for which the organisation was the global cynosure. It would be misleading to compartmentalise the science of language learning from the post-war political context. In his landmark 1953 article, Penfield cited the American politician Wendell Wilkie’s well-known wartime plea for international engagement, One World, and stated, ‘Many believe, as I do, that it is above all the bar of ignorance of language that shuts us off from other peoples, raising as it does a wall about our knowledge and understanding and brotherhood, far more impenetrable than distance or iron curtains.’ He thus offered not only an explanation of the neurology of language learning but also an impassioned entreaty for better and earlier language teaching on the grounds of needing ‘good citizens of the world’.Footnote 69 Penfield’s reasoning resonated with that of UNESCO’s monthly magazine, the UNESCO Courier, which announced, in an issue dedicated to language the following year, that the world’s language teachers ‘can play their part in dispelling . . . ignorance and can, by so doing, make the universal problem of language just that much less of a burden to the human race: just that much less of a threat to its future happiness’.Footnote 70 While UNESCO was by then under the direction of the technocratic (and monolingual) American Luther Evans (director-general from 1953 to 1958), who was far less invested in one-worldism than his predecessors Julian Huxley or Jaime Torres Bodet, the Courier’s persistent idealism vis-à-vis language teaching suggests how UNESCO’s history is not limited to Cold War polarisation or top-down machinations by governments. It has also encompassed the passage of mid-level functionaries and experts through the institution, and the ideas they discussed and wrote about.Footnote 71
This internationalist vision of multilingualism, nourished in Paris amid Cold War pressures, would animate Americans seeking to promote earlier and better language education in the post-war United States.
The US Bilingual Education Act in International and Transnational Perspective
For American advocates of greater governmental investment in language training, international examples and research provided leverage in the domestic policy debates that would ultimately produce the National Defense Education Act of 1958 (the NDEA) and the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 (the BEA). The NDEA, which pumped federal money into American universities and schools to improve training in math, science and foreign languages, has commonly been considered a response to Moscow’s October 1957 launch of Sputnik; while the BEA is most often studied in national and regional contexts.Footnote 72 Certainly Cold War tensions and domestic politics were crucial factors. Yet, if we examine them closely, the discussions that produced these laws also reflected the impact of Europe-based international institutions upon American language education. Americans leaned on UNESCO for information and institutional backing. The imprimaturs of Paris and Hamburg, where UNESCO’s Institute for Education was established in 1952, would facilitate – if also partially obscure – the movement of ideas from elsewhere into the early Cold War United States.
The Swedish American scholar Theodore Andersson, a leading figure in the Foreign Languages in the Elementary Schools (FLES) movement in the 1950s, would become a key advocate of bilingual education in the 1960s and 1970s. The son of Swedish immigrants, raised in two countries and in two languages, Andersson was primed to appreciate knowledge from elsewhere.Footnote 73 Notably, Andersson thought that Americans had more to learn about language teaching from the rest of the world than vice versa, calling the study of languages in the United States ‘notoriously unsatisfactory’: ‘if one were to set out to organize the teaching of foreign languages as inefficiently as possible’, he wrote in 1957, the result would be something like the system common to the vast majority of American high schools and colleges.Footnote 74 For at least one of his collaborators in Europe, this capacity to candidly assess American weaknesses set Andersson apart from some of his more hubristic compatriots.Footnote 75
In 1953, Andersson, then based at Yale University, chaired a month-long seminar on language teaching organised by UNESCO in newly independent Ceylon (later, Sri Lanka).Footnote 76 The Nuwara Eliya seminar was attended by representatives from across Asia: in addition to a sizeable host-country contingent, attendees came from India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia. Also represented were West Germany, France, ‘Italy and Trust Territory of Somaliland’, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel and Jordan.Footnote 77 Focused at the time of the Ceylon seminar on the teaching of foreign languages to children, Andersson encapsulated Wilder Penfield’s 1953 findings in his chapter for the seminar proceedings: ‘young children are, for purely physiological reasons, more adept than adolescents or adults in learning the language skills’.Footnote 78 Also drawing on research and examples from India, Wales, France, Denmark and Australia, Andersson marvelled at children’s capacity to learn foreign languages ‘with such ease as to induce feelings of envy in the . . . adult who contemplates his struggles with a second language’.Footnote 79 Andersson also wrote up these findings for a popular audience in a piece for the 1954 UNESCO Courier theme issue on language.Footnote 80
The findings of UNESCO’s Ceylon conference would be amplified by other American voices. In 1954’s The National Interest and Foreign Languages, Modern Language Association (MLA) executive director William Riley Parker referenced the Ceylon meeting to argue that the average American student was receiving substandard language training compared to students in other countries:
In most other countries language learning is considered, not a minor, dispensable adornment in general education, but a matter for very serious concern. In August 1953, when U.S. delegates met with foreign language teachers of 18 other nations in Ceylon for a UNESCO seminar, they learned that virtually everyone else in attendance not only assumed that foreign languages would inevitably be required of all students in secondary schools, but also thought of this language instruction in terms of either a ‘long course’ of 9 years or a ‘short course’ of 7.Footnote 81
By contrast, Parker noted that Americans started studying languages much later, if at all. This late start resulted in fewer total years of instruction – two, on average.Footnote 82
UNESCO’s imprint on Parker’s work was not merely citational; it was institutional. The National Interest and Foreign Languages had been commissioned by the US National Commission for UNESCO. As Poul Duedahl indicates, UNESCO was the only UN agency with national commissions set up to amplify localised involvement in its work, and therefore may have possessed a peculiar capacity to shape domestic policy debates in its member states.Footnote 83 Parker’s volume reflected this mission. Originally subtitled ‘a discussion guide and work paper for citizen consultations’, it was intended to bridge non-governmental, professional and sub-national opinion – that of the MLA and of American language professionals, for instance – with both national policy and international understanding.
Shortcomings crystallised in Ceylon and publicised by Parker would in turn filter into Washington’s support for domestic language education. According to the Germanist Edwin Zeydel, the official government discussions that produced the initial draft of the NDEA’s language provisions in the spring of 1957 – ‘long before Sputnik’ – sprung from Parker’s book, which ‘provided most of the argument that was subsequently presented to the Congress’.Footnote 84 Excerpts from Parker’s study were read approvingly into the Congressional Record by Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin in June 1957, who also commented on the potential for early childhood language learning.Footnote 85 After the NDEA’s passage in September 1958, Parker’s work was again credited by the law’s supporters. Indiana representative John Brademas praised The National Interest and Foreign Languages in a 1959 speech that was subsequently read into the Congressional Record by Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey.Footnote 86 By that point, Parker had moved from the MLA to the US Office of Education, where he supervised the fulfilment of the NDEA’s language provisions.Footnote 87
After returning from Ceylon, Theodore Andersson had also worked – institutionally as well as intellectually – to support the NDEA’s passage. His 1957 article ‘The Role of Foreign Languages in International Understanding’, aimed at school administrators, drove home comparisons familiar from the Ceylon conference and William Parker’s book (both were cited).Footnote 88 And, as MLA liaison to the US Office of Education and to Congress, Andersson helped translate academic insights into NDEA funding for language instruction, including in elementary schools.Footnote 89
Andersson continued to import insights from abroad into domestic settings as his focus evolved, in the late 1950s, from elementary-school language training for Anglophone Americans to bilingual education for English-language learners – the idea that students who were not already proficient in English should be taught in their mother tongue, before or in addition to learning English.Footnote 90 In 1957, he moved from Yale to the University of Texas at Austin, receiving a grant the same year to organise an experimental bilingual programme in a handful of Austin schools.Footnote 91 As in his FLES advocacy, in pressing for bilingual education Andersson stressed the wastefulness of Americans’ late start with languages, pointing up the ‘irony of teaching foreign languages to adults, expensively and inefficiently, while missing the opportunity to maintain and cultivate the linguistic competence which millions of our American children acquire by the accident of birth’.Footnote 92 In two characteristic passages, he announced that ‘we have more to learn from Canada than Canada has from us’ in the field of bilingual education; and referenced Pedro Orata’s UNESCO chapter to support the idea that early teaching in the mother tongue, before introducing English, could actually help English-language learners in English.Footnote 93
If, as Perrin Selcer writes, international diversity was becoming a marker of scientific objectivity in post-war social science – with research from Canada cited alongside studies from the Philippines, etcetera – it also at times served to blur the Global South origins of some of these examples, absorbing them into a more generalised scientific consensus.Footnote 94 In importing ideas about multilingualism and bilingual education from abroad into the United States, Andersson drew on UNESCO’s publications for scientific credibility. In the 1965 article ‘A New Focus on the Bilingual Child’, published in the Modern Language Journal, Andersson noted, ‘Justification for an early start [to language learning], resting on psychological, neurological, social, political, and economic grounds, is to be found in a report published by the UNESCO Institute for Education in Hamburg in 1963 entitled Foreign Languages in Primary Education: The Teaching of Foreign or Second Languages to Younger Children’. On the next page, he added, ‘[Both] theory and previous experiments, described, for example, in the UNESCO publication, The Use of the Vernacular Languages in Education, suggest the rightness and the effectiveness of using a child’s mother tongue to begin his formal schooling’.Footnote 95 In The Use of the Vernacular Languages in Education, Orata’s Philippines chapter and a chapter on a P’urhépecha (Tarascan)–Spanish project in Mexico provided the most concrete evidence to support bilingual education beginning in the mother tongue – though in this case, Andersson did not explicitly reference them.
This internationalist imprint would reappear a few years later in the policy discussions that produced the US Bilingual Education Act of 1968. Historians of American bilingual education have rightly emphasised the role of bilingual and immigrant communities in the United States, particularly Hispanophone communities, in animating the BEA, which as initially proposed was intended to fund initiatives serving Spanish-speaking students from Latin America and the Caribbean.Footnote 96 Yet in the debates leading up to the BEA’s passage, these hemispheric considerations became intertwined with a geographically wider set of international references and comparisons.
Theodore Andersson was one of the academic experts to appear at the Congressional hearings for the BEA, which took place in the spring and summer of 1967. In his testimony, Andersson spoke of his own experience as the child of Swedish immigrants who spoke Swedish at home. Andersson recalled moving with his parents to Sweden at age four, and then back to the United States two years later, by which point he had developed fluency in Swedish but had forgotten his English: ‘I still remember the fear I had lest the other children discover my monstrosity as a speaker of a language other than English.’ However, he noted that over time he developed feelings of ‘pride’ and ‘accomplishment’ in his ability to ‘gain easy admittance to two linguistic and cultural groups’. Andersson anticipated that federal support for two-way bilingual schooling would inspire the same feelings among speakers of Spanish and other languages. He also predicted it would enrich the education of English-speaking students.Footnote 97
Echoing earlier ethnolinguistic nationalists and imperial advocates of linguistic containment, then, Andersson suggested a symmetry between languages and cultures (‘two linguistic and cultural groups’) – the idea that the Swedish language, for instance, was a bounded container of Swedish culture. In the 1950s and 1960s it was entirely possible to support a progressive educational agenda while still fetishising the mother tongue. Linguists have since challenged the assumption that languages and cultures map so neatly onto one another, demonstrating for instance that communal identities can be deeply multilingual.Footnote 98 However, unlike ethnolinguistic nationalists or imperial elites, and more like subsequent generations of linguists, Andersson did not view the ‘mother tongue’ as the only or the most genuine way to access a culture or society: through language learning, one could access a variety of cultural milieus.
The international aspects of bilingual education were stressed by several other witnesses at the Senate hearings. Based in New York, Joseph Monserrat of Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor directed the ten continental US offices of the department’s Migration Division, which were intended to ease the integration of Puerto Ricans into mainland society. Monserrat reminded the senators that the mother tongue of these people was no alien imposition upon the United States but rather had been woven into the American social fabric by US imperialism: ‘with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 the United States became a bilingual nation… . Another dimension of . . . bilingualism . . . was added in 1917 when the Jones Act made some 1 million Puerto Ricans citizens of the United States.’Footnote 99 While Montserrat did not reference UNESCO directly in his testimony, he picked up on a postulate that William Parker’s work for the US National Commission for UNESCO had helped substantiate: the notion that the United States was ‘one of the few countries in the world in which a man can consider himself educated and speak but one language’.Footnote 100 In 1954’s influential The National Interest and Foreign Languages (reissued in new editions in 1957 and 1962), Parker had furnished comparative data from UNESCO to show that ‘[in] most other countries language learning is considered, not a minor, dispensable adornment in general education, but a matter for very serious concern’.Footnote 101
The hearings also bore traces of UNESCO’s work to circulate positive findings on bilingualism. The ‘vast body of writing by educators who believe that bilingualism is a handicap’ was mistaken, said Bruce Gaarder of the US Office of Education. How else to ‘explain the fact that over the centuries the governing and intellectual elite of all countries have quite commonly sought this kind of education [bilingual education] for their children? . . . [There] is worldwide experience on this point’. Without citing it directly, Gaarder paraphrased one of UNESCO’s 1953 conclusions on vernacular-language education. The UNESCO original read: ‘It is axiomatic that the best medium for teaching a child is his mother tongue.’ Gaarder testified: ‘There is an educational axiom accepted virtually everywhere else in the world that the best medium for teaching a child [is] his mother tongue.’Footnote 102
Evidence read into the record of the BEA hearings similarly borrowed from UNESCO’s publications sans citation. In the Senate hearings, Andersson submitted an article by his UT–Austin colleague Mildred Boyer describing ‘[a] research project carried out in the Philippines among children whose native language was Hiligaynon [that] again proved conclusively that the mother tongue is the most efficient medium of basic instruction’.Footnote 103 This closely tracked a line from the 1953 UNESCO volume The Use of Vernacular Languages in Education, in which Pedro Orata had cited Jose V. Aguilar’s experimental conclusion that ‘“[the] local vernacular, Hiligaynon, is a much more effective medium of instruction in the first two primary grades than English”’.Footnote 104 Gaarder’s testimony and Boyer’s article confirm, again, how seemingly domestic policy developments were entangled in wider webs of exchange that criss-crossed Europe, the postcolonial world, and the United States, though at times these connections went unacknowledged.
Conclusion
The Americanisation of twentieth-century western Europe is a well-established subject in historiography. From Hollywood films and Coca-Cola to mass marketing and GDP accounting, the US military–commercial colossus exported products, techniques and propaganda across the Atlantic, influencing European politics and societies in the process.Footnote 105 Expanding the circle of the powerful but similarly homing in on power’s imprint, historians of development and modernisation policies have examined how Euro-American economic ideologies shaped Asia, Africa and Latin America from the late colonial era across the period of political decolonisation.Footnote 106 Such macroscopic approaches have much to tell us about how geopolitics shaped socio-cultural change across the twentieth century, including linguistic shifts such as the rise of English as a global lingua franca and the endangerment of many smaller languages by imperialism, capitalism and nationalism.Footnote 107
As this article has suggested, however, unidirectional heuristics do not tell the whole story of twentieth-century political, cultural or linguistic change. The renewal of bilingual education in the Cold War United States provides an example of the contingent and at times unpredictable movement of culture and ideas across political borders. After 1945, UNESCO served as a conduit of cultural and intellectual traffic that encompassed traffic from the Global South to the Global North, and from Europe to the United States, thereby helping propel transformations that are often framed in domestic terms.Footnote 108
Beyond contributing to a more dialectical understanding of Cold War cultural and intellectual exchange, this case study also has implications for the history of international institutions. Paris was less a point of origin for these ideas than it was a locus of exchange and of amplification. Recent work in transimperial and global history suggests the value of not only analysing transnational flows – the circulation of concepts across national borders – but also interrogating the interest of the nation/empire as a conceptual container or autochthonous site of origin. Historians of the transimperial turn have challenged centre–periphery transfer models of knowledge and their implicit assumptions about the links between power and ideation, instead highlighting circulation, shared assumptions and co-creation.Footnote 109 Similarly, in his global history of social policy-making in the 1930s, Kiran Klaus Patel writes that ‘[instead] of focusing on roots, it is more interesting to investigate the routes on which knowledge traveled’. Patel notes that by that point, ‘[decades] – and on some issues, even centuries – of mutual observation, transnational conversation, and global awareness among actors from various parts of the world had turned most ideas into cultural hybrids’.Footnote 110 To this we might add geographer Tim Cresswell’s point that routes are not without a politics of their own.Footnote 111 The case of bilingual education suggests how, after political decolonisation, the imprimatur of international institutions – that is, passage through Western metropoles – could lend scientific credibility to research and experiments from the Global South as they made their way into the world.
Finally, the article shows how international and transnational history might inflect our understanding of some keywords in linguistics. The ‘mother tongue’ is one such hybrid idea. Born in European languages in the late medieval and early modern eras, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it circulated transnationally and transimperially chiefly in the service of ethnolinguistic nationalisms and colonial linguistic containment. Yet although many nationalists and imperial elites attempted to construct pure mother tongues in the spaces they ruled, the concept of the mother tongue was not so pure: after 1945 it was absorbed into postcolonial ethnonationalism, to be sure, but also into the bilingual education experimentation and advocacy incubated at UNESCO. The US Bilingual Education Act of 1968 captured this hybridity, as former colonial subjects-turned-international civil servants offered rationales for bilingual education that were taken up by mainland policymakers, and as imperially instrumentalised categories slipped into other, more politically progressive (if never wholly enlightened) guises.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Bernhard Struck, Guilherme Moreira Fians, David Karlander, Jan Surman, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
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