University of Virginia Library

Colloquium

Decline In Study Of Languages Endangers Liberal Education

By BENJAMIN BENNETT

—Ed.)

The medium of
communication between
teacher and student at the
University is language. It
follows that the extent to
which the student is in
command of his language will
limit his ability to learn. Not
many people will dispute this.

What we mean here by a
"command" of one's language,
however, has to include the
idea of originality; the good
student must be not only
familiar with his language but
also able to create with it. One
does not truly learn, one
cannot master new concepts or
new ways of thinking, by the
application of one's old verbal
habits, say the habits brought
along by the average student
from secondary school.

If a way of thinking is really
new to one, then a new way of
speaking or writing is needed if
one is to come to grips with it.
The student has to have more
than acceptable habits; he must
command the fundamental
principles of his language well
enough to be able to apply
them in creating new meanings
for himself.

Reformulate

He must be able to
reformulate, criticize, employ
and expand the ideas offered
him by his professors;
otherwise he has not
understood those ideas in the
first place.

This is the reason for
freshman English courses. But
it is also an argument for the
study of ancient and modern
languages. The trouble with
English courses is that most
students are under the
impression that they already
know English, need practice
and polish perhaps, but have
the basic knowledge.

One of the college-teacher's
most important tasks is to
disabuse the student of this.
The really good student is the
man who understands that
there is no such thing as
"knowing" one's language, the
man who is willing to work at
his language constantly, willing
to go over it again and again

from the ground up, perfecting
its shape, refining its
distinctions, expanding its
possibilities, getting rid of all
the useless habits and
affectations and flourishes that
serve merely to distort and
limit his thinking.

Only such a man will
genuinely profit from
university education, and the
foreign-language course-in
which, necessarily, the relation
between the fundamental
principles of a language and the
actual use of the language is

studied in detail-plays a
definite part in making the
beginning student conscious of
this. It is still perhaps true that
a thorough and rigorous
English composition course can
achieve the same end more
directly. But if the students in
that composition course are
also studying foreign languages,
then it is that much more
likely that the English
instructor's efforts will bear
fruit.

There is, moreover, one
thing the English composition
course simply cannot do. It
seems, to an uneducated man,
that language is the exact
image of an objectively existing
system of possibilities for
experience and thought, which
in turn constitutes the world;
out there is the world, and
language is the way we talk
about it.

What such a man does not
realize is that all his
experiences and thoughts are
shaped by his language, and
that the actual possibilities are
infinitely more varied than he
has imagined. It makes me
uncomfortable, for example, if
I am talking to a German and
he uses the word "Heimat," for
this word expresses an
experience that I have not had,
and that would probably
disturb me if I suddenly
somehow did have it.

I, being an American, may
feel a very strong attachment
to this or that geographical
area, but always with the sense,
to correct Robert Frost, that
the land is mine, that I am not
the land's; I do not belong to
New York or New England,
and for that matter the
English-speaker in general does
not belong to say Shropshire or
Dublin or Wessex, in so nearly
absolute a sense as the German
belongs to the Black Forest or
the Luneburger Heide.

A casual expression like
"heading stateside," which is
perfectly natural in the
American military, would
never occur to a German. The
experience of going home or
being at home, which we
ordinarily suppose universal, is
in reality not shared by
English-speakers and
German-speakers.

This is perhaps not a
particularly fruitful example in
itself. But it is a very simple
one, and will, I hope, move the
reader to agree that the subtler
and more complex experiences
involved in literature and
philosophy and scholarship are
even less likely to correspond
precisely in different languages.

The point is that the English
language is limited; the
speaking of English, or of any
particular language, excludes
one from a great deal of actual
human thought and
experience. This point cannot
be made in an English course;
one cannot understand where
the limits of one's own
language are if one does not
have an idea of what lies
beyond those limits.

Integrity

And yet it is absolutely
necessary that this point be
made, and driven home
strongly, as part of a college
education; otherwise
education, or at least
liberal-arts education, makes
no real sense to the student.
The student who has had no
experience of other languages
will tend to regard his own
language as merely a useful
thing, having no interest in
itself, nothing but an
instrument for learning as such,
those branches of learning
which do not seem to be of
any immediate use to the
student, will therefore tend not
to interest him, he will
specialize early and never in
the true sense be an educated
man.

If, however, the student
understands that his language is
not basically an instrument at
all, but rather a particular way of being, and moreover an
incomplete way of being,
which can be expanded
significantly if one but has the
energy to work at it, if the
student understands that by
speaking differently he
becomes a different person,
and that by broadening and
refining his language he
broadens and refines himself,
then that student will be more
inclined to involve himself even
in studies of no foreseeable use
to him, for the sake of the new
possibilities of speaking the
represent; that student, in
other words, will transform
himself in his learning and
come away with a far more
thorough and better balanced
education.

Or to look at these ideas
more in terms of the student's
day-to-day existence: it
happens, it must happen, that a
college student will often find
himself simply unable to
understand something he has
either read in a book or heard
in a lecture. The
secondary-school teacher is
under a certain obligation to
make sure that his pupils
understand everything he says,
even if this means talking down
to them.

The college teacher is under
no such obligation; his prime
concern must always be the
actual integrity and accuracy
of his statements. College is an
adult world: otherwise it is
meaningless. Now when the
student fails to understand,
when he is faced with a
challenge which, for the
moment at least, is more than
he can handle, there are two
courses of action open to him.
Either he works out a
makeshift paraphrase, in his
own habitual language, of what
he has read or heard, or else he
undertakes to find out what is
wrong with his habits, what it
is that prevents him from
attaining a clear critical grasp
of the statement in question.

It is of course only in the
latter case that he actually
learns anything. But the
student who has had no real
language-training will be all too
likely to comfort himself in the
illusion that his own mastery
of his own language is adequate
for dealing with whatever he
encounters; his habits will
distort much of what is
presented to him. If, however,
the student understands that
even his language as a
whole - let alone that
incomplete version of it
represented by his own present
abilities-is adequate for
dealing with only a limited
amount of actual human
experience, then he will, I
think, be better prepared to
accept the possibility that his
failure to understand is caused
by a limitation in his own way
of thinking and speaking; that
is, he will be more willing to
undertake the radical personal
self-development of true
learning.

This, in brief, is why
languages are necessary. But
must languages be taught in
college? I think the answer to
this question would still be yes,
even if the teaching of language
in secondary school were not
so inadequate as it often is at
present. In order that the
effects described above be
realized, a relatively
sophisticated form of language
course will be needed, one that
includes a good deal of serious
grammatical theory, and
perhaps history, along with the
careful study of challengingly
subtle texts.

Such a course might be
started in high school, but
would certainly have to be
continued in college. In the
first place, not many high
schools will be able to provide
good enough teachers; and in
the second place, the
necessarily protective
atmosphere of high school will
not of itself tend strongly
enough to encourage the
establishment of adult
intellectual independence
which is the essential aim of
language study.

Perhaps a more pressing
question nowadays, however, is
whether languages ought to be
required in college. Again the
answer is yes. That student
who "decides" not to study a
language is not really making a
decision at all, because he does
not know what he is deciding
against.

There is simply no way to
understand the value of good
language-training until after
one has had it, and the average
college entrant has not had
such training. A student might
even be inclined to "agree"
with what I have said above
concerning the limitedness of
any given language in relation
to the whole possible range of
human thinking, but he does
not know this truth from
experience, it has not yet
become, as it must, an integral
part of his intellectual
existence, until he has learned
at least one foreign language
thoroughly.

The same considerations
apply to the question of the
usefulness of those
culture-and-civilization courses
which are sometimes proposed
as substitutes for language
courses. Again, learning about
another culture is not enough.
It is only by learning the
language that one can come
near actually participating in
another culture; and it is only
thus, in turn, that a sense of
the limitedness of one's own
cultural perspective can
become an integral part of
one's way of thinking, rather
than merely a piece of abstract
knowledge. Hence the need for
a language requirement.

It may be remarked-I
think, quite properly-that

much of the above is in essence
an argument not only for the
retention of the language
requirement but for the
necessity of requirements in
general. The language
requirement, however,
occupies a central position in a
sense it is the key requirement,
without which all else becomes
idle.

Requirements, namely, are
useless if the students are
absolutely opposed to them;
this is why so many
requirements have been
dropped or eased at so many
institutions. But the student
will remain absolutely opposed
to requirements only so long as
he has not yet come to
appreciate, by way of
immediate experience rather
than abstract thought, the
limitedness of his own
intellectual outlook.

Once the student has
actually experienced his
limitations, he will no longer
regard it as oppressive or
insulting that he be required to
try his hand at say
mathematics or social sciences
or humanities; he will now
regard requirements not as
impositions but as
opportunities.

And as we have seen, the
foreign-language course-on the
deepest possible level, the level
of language and thought as
such, not applied to particular
objects-is the experience of
one's intellectual limitedness. I
do not mean to suggest that
the above applies only to
students.

An experienced awareness
of the limitedness, the
questionableness, of one's own
perspective is the sinc qua non
of an educated existence from
beginning to end. We never
outgrow this awareness; it but
deepens in us as we mature.
But such an awareness does
not, or does not necessarily,
awaken of its own accord. It
must be taught and therefore
the language requirement
remains indispensable.

Nor will it do to object that
language courses as they are
now taught in most colleges do
not actually accomplish what I
have suggested they should
accomplish. If this is true, as it
almost certainly is, then it
follows that language-training
in college must be made more
sophisticated, more
intellectually demanding.

Benefits

It does not follow that
language requirements ought to
be eliminated. If the
requirement is removed, then
language courses will in many
cases become less demanding,
in order to order to attract
more students, and the benefits
derivable from language study
will become that much harder
to realize.

The reader may be now
have concluded that I am not
an advocate of the
audio-lingual method of
teaching languages. This is true.
I think the aim of
language-training should be not
to create habits but to break
habits, to make the student
worry about language, not to
make him more sure of
himself.

No Pattern

I think the truly educated
man is a man for whom there
is no such thing as an
established pattern in language;
a man for whom, every
sentence is a unit of conscious
and careful thought. But I do
not want to make an issue of
this.

In practice, after all, habit
does form an important part of
the way we know language,
and there is no real reason why
a teaching approach that begins
with the formation of habits
should not in the end arrive at
something deeper and more
intellectually rewarding,
although I myself, again,
think this procedure
unnecessarily circuitous.

The differences between the
audio-lingual method and the
traditional method have been
exaggerated by theorists on
both sides. If the intelligen
audio-lingual teacher and the
intelligent
grammar-and-reading teacher
could see into one another's
classrooms, they would
probably discover that they are
actually doing very much the
same thing, each compromising
considerably the supposes
purity of his method.

The really important thing
is not the method by which
languages are taught but the
fact that they are taught, and
that they be taught universally.
Many people nowadays, not all
of them students, consider the
language requirement an
encroachment upon
intellectual freedom.

This is absurd.

The point of my whole
argument, assuming that it
holds together, has been that a
decline in the study of
languages will endanger the
very ideal of liberal education,
the very idea of education as
opposed to indoctrination, the
very idea of an education by
which the mind is truly
emancipated.