Bourdieu and Whorf

It is also interesting to note that Bourdieu specifically discerns a kind of folk-Whorfian (Mertz 1982) world-view at work in the imposition and functioning of this model. Teachers in French schools are on the front lines, as it were, working constantly to ``inculcate a clear faculty of expression and of each emotion," i.e. through language. They work to replace the patois, which is nothing but a jumble of confusion, with standard French, itself the only ``clear and fixed" thing that deserves to be in their heads, and trying to get them to perceive and feel things in the same way. The work of the teacher is ``to erect the common conscience of the nation." Bourdieu calls this a Whorfian or Humboldtian theory of language, which sees scholarly action as ``intellectual and moral integration." (Bourdieu op cit.p.32.) Teaching language, therefore, is a kind of mind control;' instilling the standard language in the heads of children will reprogram them to think clearly.