ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses autonomy in language education from a rather different perspective, emphasizing the importance of looking at language learning in terms of 'voice' and the struggle for 'cultural alternatives'. It points to the inadequacy of the liberal-democratic and liberal-humanist versions of choice and autonomy, and suggested that it can never be possible to achieve more than partial cultural or ideological autonomy. One initial observation worth making is that it is not only in language education that the notion of autonomy has become particularly salient but also in a number of other contexts. For many years we have been hearing that autonomy is important. Equality and autonomy for women is a struggle amid the cultural politics of gender to find cultural alternatives for how our lives can be lived. The chapter also suggestes that a key aspect of the liberal humanist idea of autonomy was the idea of self-mastery.
