Doe normaal in meer dan één taal!

In this text I argue that the Dutch society sometimes seems to have lost the capacity to embrace multilingualism and language variation – and I explore what role education might play in this development. Hence, it might be that a strong prescriptive attitude towards language in primary schools, which manifests itself explicitly in instruction and feedback on spelling, is followed by an equally strict perspective on language learning and language variation in secondary schools. Could it be that such an account negatively affects students’ willingness to engage with other languages than the most common ones in the Netherlands, that is, Dutch and English? I finish by briefly showcasing how a multilingual approach that embraces translanguaging and lingua receptiva at university level, fosters the European ideal of plurilingual individuals.