The legal forms of migrant education (OETC and OALT) existed in the Netherlands from 1985 to 2004. Both its start and its ending have been linked to changing national models of integration. Five...Show moreThe legal forms of migrant education (OETC and OALT) existed in the Netherlands from 1985 to 2004. Both its start and its ending have been linked to changing national models of integration. Five models by Scholten are compared for the political discourse and the news discourse. These are: assimilationism, multiculturalism, differentialism, transnationalism/post-universalism and universalism. The shifts in the political discourse (differentialism-multiculturalism-universalism-assimilationism) were only to a certain extent comparable to the news discourse. Newspapers as Trouw, De Waarheid, Nederlands Dagblad, Algemeen Dagblad and De Volkskrant showed that the multicultural model of which OETC and OALT were an outcome, should have been put to doubt – and was merely symbolic. Migrant education did not lead to integration from either minorities or the majority. It still accommodated differences between groups. And although a multicultural model has a minimum amount of government interference, the government did play a central role here. Especially De Volkskrant and Trouw have seemed to be on the right end by labeling migrant education in the Netherlands as a legacy of the nation’s past of differentialist pillarization: OETC and OALT as ‘well-meant apartheid’. Notably De Waarheid influenced the political discourse by acting as a claim maker pro-migrant education.Show less
