Socio-cultural and linguistic aspects of Roma education

Abstract

The Roma in Europe are again in a state of peril. There is a long history of research by psychologists attempting to prove a genetic basis for purported racial differences in intelligence, namely IQ. It began over a century ago with psychologists newly armed with IQ measures, trying to differentiate those immigrants “fit” for immigration to the United States (Jackson and Weidman, 2004). After the horrors of the Third Reich and racial purification (Gound, 1981), such work fell into disrepute. Ironically, the Civil Rights movement in the United States re-awakened interest in racial differences. Once educational inequalities between Blacks and Whites were acknowledged and began to be redressed, attention turned very quickly to the “achievement gap” in education between the “races” (Jensen, 1973) as if four hundred years of inequality could be solved by desegregating some schools (Onwuegbuzie and Daley, 2001) (Fragment tekstu).