The first foreign language course in college

JHS
Wed, 28 May 2008 18:55:29 +0000

I think it’s important to learn about more customs, beliefs, and values than you can learn languages. But I think you have a different experience of different “customs, beliefs, and values” if you are dealing with them directly, and you need to engage with at least one foreign language to do that. Do you think someone’s view of America is different if they know English, or only Arabic or Chinese?

By the way, I don’t think it’s “essential” to force all students into it, either. But I think its an essential component of all elite educations, and of lots of non-elite educations, too. It has roughly the same status as math, for me: inexhaustible for a few, but everyone who claims to be educated should have some basic familiarity with what it’s like.