Language-in-education policies play a large role in knowledge construction, especially when language is perceived as connected to culture, world view, and identity; with implications for critical real-world issues from cultural and economic rights to identity (see Language and World View). The ideology that allows education to reshape the definitions or boundaries of knowledge itself implicates languages’ potential role in knowledge construction. This differs from anthropological views of culture and identity because we live now in the so-called Knowledge Societies or Information Age where knowledge is commodified and tied to science (assumed as ‘universal’ knowledge), with Education as a salvation narrative that often ends up playing a part in the subjugating of peoples and perpetuation of the status quo. (See Language Education Markets, High Stakes Exams.) Global models of education affect the nature of “knowledge” and perpetuate an ever-increasingly elite status quo. Schooling, (higher) education, academia, sciences, academic disciplines, even perhaps the media and communication have become nearly synonymous with knowledge. Unlike centuries ago, this conception of knowledge is not a whole but more and more fragmented and reduced into specialized fields and technical applications.

Since schooling is increasingly institutionalized and compulsory (more and more worldwide), it is easy to understand how language in education policies that favor non-mother tongue and dominant (often English) standardized curriculum construct a knowledge system that is foreign to most students, especially in the case of the ever-increasing language shifts and knowledge and language disappearance. Literacies, and conceptions of what is ‘education’ or knowledge are culturally specific and tied to history and cultural practices. Or for another example, in Indigenous world views, education is not separate from language, so the many forces that have attempted to or succeed at breaking the transmission of language was catastrophic. Even in places where culturally-specific or Indigenous knowledge systems are propagated and incorporated into the curriculum, a dichotomy sometimes arises between what is considered “ethno” knowledge (ethnobotany, ethnomathematics, etc.) and “academic” (ie real?) knowledge.

For more on alternatives or methods to mediate policies, see Community Models, Deep Education, Ways out of the Paradoxes.