Content area
This curriculum inquiry situates foreign language as a pedagogy of social reproduction. Foreign language learning, positioned as second culture learning, is a content area that ostensibly fosters appreciation of diversity and cross-cultural understanding. Yet foreign language, by presenting cultural content representing half-truths and bland, historical information that will not reflect badly on the United States, promotes and produces social reproduction. Discourse and metaphor represent minority cultures as inferior, instrumental literacy disallows linkages to the historical past, and knowledge is commodified in textbooks as dominant cultural content. These curriculum practices, as part of the hidden curriculum, exacerbate unequal outcomes in education while reproducing society in its present stratified form through schooling.