Dean Holmes Decries Inadequacy of Language Requirements---Advocates Real Mastery of One

"Language requirements should lead toward mastery of some one foreign tongue, not to a bare reading knowledge of one coupled with a smattering of another," Henry W. Holmes '03, Dean of the Harvard School of Education, stated in a CRIMSON interview yesterday. "I believe," he said, "that the student should acquire a permanent command of at least one language as a tool of learning and a source of continued education and satisfaction. Colleges ought not to hide behind the abstractions of an admission system in terms of points, a system which encourages carrying Latin for four years and then dropping it, French for two or three years, and German for a little while.

"The principal value in a language is in its literature; this may be obtained through translation, of course, but much is inevitably lost this way, especially in the case of poetry. An intelligent reading of literature in a foreign tongue demands a command of the language far superior to that which is demanded under most college requirements. It is not feasible to require of every student the ability to speak a foreign language, even haltingly, although a reasonably good pronunciation should be established as part of the approach toward fluent reading and for the sake of understanding the language when spoken; but there is nothing unreasonable in a requirement that imposes on every student the duty of reading with case one language beside his own and of having covered a large part of the great literature in that tongue. Such a requirement would certainly be more reasonable than the requirements now in force in many colleges, because it would at least lead to something permanently valuable for the student.

"I know that something can be said for a bowing acquaintance with a language, but such casual results can be left, I believe, to the interstices of an educational career."