Language and Culture

The Great Language Problem has popped up on the docket of every Faculty meeting in the last few months, only to be sidetracked by more urgent business. When it finds time, the Faculty should chew the problem over thoroughly, and then make some broad changes. For there is a general dissatisfaction with the content and instruction of the College's basic and intermediary language courses.

Nouns and syntax are the fundamentals of any language, but they are hardly the totality. Under the present language program, too many courses seek only to enable the student to pass the College's minimum language requirement, chaining students to grammar drill and little else. A college language course even for beginners, should offer a perspective over more than irregular verbs. Unless a language is taught in the context of a foreign culture, its fundamentals are quickly forgotten, regarded solely as means to hurdle a requirement. Yet many College language courses, themselves with only the requirement in view, plod on through the tedium of unadorned syntax.

But this basic knowledge is a necessary tool for delving into another country's culture. Ideally, it should be learned in secondary school. Students should enter Harvard ready to pursue languages as mature subjects, rather than as elementary memorization courses.

To insure this, the College should require wherever possible three years of secondary instruction in a modern language for all applicants. It could then send entering Freshmen directly into a language-culture course, for which he has already been groomed. In this course, he could use the language to study the literature, history and mores of the foreign country.

A Little Imagination

This culture course should use as many films, slides, records and other instructional gimmicks as needed to make the subject interesting as well as informative. Students rarely get even mildly enthusiastic grinding over a language of a people they only vaguely understand. It is up to language departments to use their imagination, if they cannot use their budgets, to make such a course as colorful as possible.

There are, of course, many top-notch applicants to the College who may not complete three years of a modern language either because their school has skimpy facilities or because they are not aiming directly at Harvard. If they can otherwise meet the tests of College entrance, these students should enter more elementary modern language courses, where they can pick up enough rudiments to enter the intermediary language culture course. In the long run, the number of language-poor can greatly dwindle if the College lets on to secondary schools that it favors the three-year training program.

Every student, then, would take the more advanced course in a modern language, as soon as he is qualified. If the course keeps up with the times, the College's language requirement will leave undergraduates with some understanding of both a language and the culture in which it has evolved, instead of leaving him a distasteful memory of tiresome grappling with abstract language symbols.