Education
first language teaching in schools is traditionally prescriptive.[citation needed] Both educators and parents often agree that mastery of a prestige variety of the language is one of the goals of education.[citation needed] Since the 1970s there has been a widespread trend to balance this with other priorities, such as encouraging children to find their own forms of expression and be creative also with non-standard speech-patterns. Nevertheless, the acquisition of spoken and written skills in normative language varieties remains a key aim of schools around the world.

Foreign language teaching is necessarily prescriptive. Here the students have no prior idiom of their own in the target language and are entirely focused on the acquisition of norms laid down by others