The Linguistic Divide, Autolinguals, and the Notion of Education-for-All

Education-For-All (EFA), understood as an ‘equal education opportunity for every single person on the globe’, is a challenge of this century that cannot be met without advanced information technologies and instructional computing. One question we must address is whether EFA is a force that will advance social welfare and equality on a global scale or institutionalize differences in social class outlook. EFA comes to achieve its principled reality only when the former is the case. This paper clarifies that a possible factor that may affect EFA negatively will be found in linguistic disparity, whose effect is characterized here as the ‘linguistic divide’. The paper nonetheless reports that the emergence of automatic portable multilingual mediators (translators and interpreters), which I wish to call ‘autolinguals’, is forthcoming at an affordable cost in the very near future, and that logically this should overcome the linguistic divide. Given that EFA is a technical reality, the paper then directs its discussion to implications for the future of schooling.