Foreign Worker Parents Between ‘Tradition’ and ‘Modernity’ and Their Children Between ‘Two Cultures’, 1970s–1980s
During the 1970s and early 1980s, children with a migration history were, in short, framed on the one hand based on their parents’ relation to the labour market—namely as ‘foreign workers’ often in unskilled jobs and associated with rural life and ‘traditional family patterns’—and on the other hand by their (lack of) language skills.
Rural life vs urban life and tradition vs modernity became a scheme for describing the lifestyles of the migrants. It drew on the concept of culture as the central understanding and not, for instance, on the concepts of society and class, including the impact of class background in schooling that at the time—inspired by university Marxism, etc.—were otherwise upcoming pedagogical explanations in relation to the problems of schooling. To use culture as such a distinction draws on knowledge from the cultural social sciences, such as cultural sociology and anthropology, a transfer that was explicated. It was also problematised by some scholars from these scientific fields.7 However, the distinction was effective in early pedagogical ideas of foreign children from foreign worker families being ‘divided between two cultures’; this was a form of describing and explaining the children that would come to dominate the following decades.Early examples of this are reports and other publications from a Copenhagen school, Sj?llandsgades Skole, where the municipality in 1971 established an Office for Foreign-Language Pupils (‘Kontoret for Fremmedsprogede Elever’) and where teachers, consultants, and municipal administrators with a teaching background became very active in creating a body of knowledge through the publishing of articles in teachers’ magazines, handbooks, and supervision manuals. From the outset, it was especially ‘Kineserborn’ (China children)—i.e. Chinese-speaking pupils from migrant families who had arrived during the 1960s and were residing in the school district—whose culture and ‘milieu background’ were described (e.g.
Hill 1971); in the first attempt to make more of a handbook in 1974, Islam was particularly emphasised as ‘dominating among foreign-language pupils’. ‘Seventy percent of the Yugoslavians who attend Copenhagen schools are Muslims’, it was pointed out (Odde 1974, 29). Whereas the Chinese-speaking pupils were described culturally, but not through their religion, Islam was primarily depicted as a culture concretised in habits and traditions. The text was generally critical of the allegedly liberal teachers’ culture that was distant to religion, which was contrasted with the traditions and habits of the parents of the foreign-language pupils. The front cover of the publication was a graphic illustration picturing a dark-haired, sad-looking child torn into two tattered pieces.In a municipal report developed by actors with relations to the same school from 1976, parents were interviewed and categorised according to their origin from either an area with a ‘strong religiosity in a more traditional sense’ or ‘an area where religion and codes of conduct in society, concurrently with advancing industrialisation, have gone through a re- and new interpretation more attuned to modern society’ (Bogsted-Moller 1976, 55; Buchardt 2012). Although still at the margins, religion as a cultural parameter was in the process of becoming established as part of the explanatory models.
The reception classes became a nation-wide practice through a ministerial order in 1976, the first that gave more detailed directions for what were now called ‘foreign-language pupils’. The term ‘foreign children’ was about to be abandoned. The order mentioned ‘foreign-language pupils living in the country’ in line with children ‘that will be staying in the country for more than six months’ (Bekendtgorelse 1976). In other words, the pupils in question were increasingly seen as a more permanent part of the school population.
Though the lack of official guidelines was heavily criticised in the late 1970s by, among others, teachers who specialised and started circles and later associations concerning foreign-language pupils as a specific area of schooling, it was not until 1979 that the Ministry of Education sent out an actual supervision manual on the teaching of foreign-language pupils (Sogaard Thomsen 2004b; Fremmedsprogede elever 1979).
Immigrant organisations that had been established since the mid-1970s started to voice dissatisfaction with what was seen as a lack of a foreign worker policy in general, including the educational conditions in schools. Some of these associations were based on the country of origin, while some represented immigrants and foreign workers in general, seeking to serve as umbrella organisations for the nation-based associations. One of the points of criticism was the conditions and regulations concerning mother tongue instruction, and it was suggested that mother tongue instruction become mandatory. Another demand was that Danish should always be taught as a foreign language when taught to foreign-language pupils. These criticisms and solutions seem to have been shared extensively in the upcoming milieus of teachers of foreign-language pupils (e.g. Clausen 1982). In a 1980 policy paper from the IFD, the Common Council of Immigrants in Denmark, the organisation warned about the future consequences of the fact that the pupils ‘had become a mixture of half languages, with two half-cultures and traditions, with two half-identities’.8In 1980, a special issue of Uddannelse, a magazine published by the Ministry of Education, bore the title ‘New Danes: Cultural encounter or cultural clash’. Dorte Bennedsen, the Social Democrat minister of education, used the terms ‘children of foreign workers’ and ‘foreign-language pupils’ interchangeably (Bennedsen 1980, 340). The minister’s text, titled ‘The problems surrounding the foreign-language pupil’, stated that since ‘it is given that the problems surrounding the foreign-language children are great’, it would be ‘desirable to come up with some remarks of a more general nature on the question which can hopefully elucidate some of the problems’ (Bennedsen 1980, 337). However, no concrete educational problem was actually mentioned. Rather, the text stuck to a description of the legal basis of the group of pupils and the special services given to them in school, focusing on language.
That ‘the problem’, as the minister saw it, was connected to language was in other words presupposed but never explicitly stated. However, the minister emphasised that, for instance, children with a Danish mother but a foreign father might have ‘the same problems regarding cultural clashes’ as the children ‘registered’ as ‘foreign-language’ (Bennedsen 1980, 340). The problem with ‘the foreign-language pupil’ was in other words more than language, namely culture, but language served as a gateway for categorisation, strategy development, and knowledge production about the ‘children of foreign workers’ and their culture.Though the concrete solutions differed, as did the power and scope of the actors, it seems to have been common that the diagnosis of culture as a central factor of explanation was entangled with all other elements at play in the debates. Language and the social status as foreign workers, for instance, were part of the diagnosis, but they were also overshadowed by culture as the explanation.