Resumen de Mother-tongue education versus bilingual education: shifting ideologies and policies in the Republic of Slovakia
The case of educational planning in the Republic of Slovakia rests on a long and complex history of shifting power relations between Hungarians and Slovaks. This paper examines the set of moves on the part of the Slovak political establishment and countermoves on the part of the Hungarian minority political and intellectual community during the period 1990–1995.
Alternative education was a proposal to replace Hungarian mother-tongue schools with schools that use Slovak as the medium of instruction as well as a subject, with the aim of improving the Slovak language knowledge of Hungarian-minority members in the Republic of Slovakia. I analyze both the proposal and resistance to it from the perspective of underlying ideologies that define the nation on the basis of the link between language and national identity. We will see that these ideologies have led to conflicts between the two groups as they construct the state. The paper then examines the extent to which influences from outside the state, in particular Western political and academic thought, have informed the structure of the arguments relating to alternative education.
