Parents, Personalities and Power

“This well-balanced and detailed study of the involvement of government and parents in the successful growth of Welsh-medium school in southeast Wales is a major contribution to our understanding of the possibilities of bilingual education and how it may be achieved. It adds Welsh-medium schools to the classic cases of successful parental intervention—the revitalization of Hebrew in the farming villages of Ottoman Palestine around 1890, the development of French-immersion classes in English-speaking schools in Québec in the 1960s, and the regeneration of Maori through the grassroots language nests of New Zealand in the 1980s.”

“With this book, grassroots movements and especially the agency of parents take central stage. It is a tribute to the important role that Welsh parents have had in the construction of Welsh-medium education, but it offers also a multilayered and complex analysis of the future, pointing to some of the challenges of preserving the vision of the past while innovating for an increasingly diverse and multilingual Europe. It offers hope for the continued engagement of parents and grassroots movements, as Welsh-medium education becomes mainstreamed and professionalized.”

“Language revival is born out of the passion, commitment, and mobilization of minority language communities themselves. These communities are in turn based on activities, parents, teachers, and students. This remarkably rich volume on Welsh-language schooling in southeast Wales highlights the key policy and political developments, and the key people involved in them, that have seen Cymraeg return not only as a language of educational instruction but also as a language of the wider civic realm.”