The foreign language profile at school as a category of social segregation – Historical development and present relevance of the foreign language profile at school as a dimension of horizontal educational inequality

Abstract

Even though the knowledge of modern foreign languages is today indispensable for making a career, Latin remains popular in German schools. Contrary to its image as a useless relict, the chances of Latin-graduates on the job market are beyond average. How can that be explained? Based on data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), I show that there is a positive correlation between belonging to the educated middle-class and knowledge in Latin. Hence, both the general popularity and the positive impact on the labor market is produced, I argue, by the historically established symbolic meaning of Latin as a marker of cultural distinction. In order to illustrate this argument, the historical developments in higher secondary education in Germany regarding the choice of foreign languages are analyzed and interpreted by means of Bourdieu’s field theory. The dominance of modern foreign languages, as prevalent in today’s labor market-oriented schooling system, proves to be a product of the success of heretical forces in the field that pushed back the orthodox humanist educational ideal. In the course of the inflation of the Abitur through the educational expansion of the past decades, the distinctiveness of the Abitur has shifted to the humanistic Abitur in particular. As a result, the choice of foreign languages at school is to be regarded as a mechanism of social closure.