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.