Introduction: Rethinking Languages education: dismantling instrumentalist agendas

Twenty-first century education has become an explicitly utilitarian exercise. Its contribution to society is evaluated, almost exclusively, in terms of the development of future global citizens adaptable to rapidly changing sociopolitical, economic and technological conditions. Under this ideological premise, Languages education is defined reductively as a strategic skill that facilitates employability and global mobility. Such educational agendas selectively highlight the economic benefits of linguistic and cultural diversity, yet ignore the relationship between language and the everyday ontologies and epistemologies that is at the heart of the conceptualisation, use and teaching and learning of languages. In this chapter, the authors deconstruct the neoliberal approach to Languages education. They set out the parameters for a comprehensive interrogation of the systems and conditions that devise Languages education, and the unsettling of the instrumentalist agendas that constrain and reify Languages policy, curriculum, pedagogy and practice. This chapter proposes reorientation: renouncing ideologies that disempower and disenfranchise languages and their speakers from each other, and reclaiming the humanist stance that is the central tenet of Languages education.