No, Thank You

Before leaving Harvard, every student must swim fifty yards and score the equivalent of 560 on a College Board language exam. Skeptics may perhaps be forgiven for wondering which is more important as education. The swimming test reflects the rough and ready days of Teddy Roosevelt; the language requirement goes back to the golden age when fluent Greek was the hallmark of educated Roman patricians.

During the middle ages, scholars studied Latin to hold learned discourse in that tongue and to distinguish the wise and good from the masses. Later, courtiers replaced Latin with French, and in the days of the czars nobles often spoke French better than their native language--French, after all, was civilized.

We needed the English public school system to teach us that Latin is not only a language to be learned but a discipline to be endured. Modern pedagogues have also discovered that knowing foreign languages is vital to national security, and that studying them gives us perspective on ourselves.

Discipline might come from studying mathematics or science or history, but apparently having language study required makes it even better discipline--doesn't hurt those who are willing, and is good for recalcitrant souls. The doctrine of wisdom through suffering is nowhere more popular than among defenders of indefensible positions.

Living in a shrinking world, Americans have an obligation to be able to communicate with their neighbors, and one way to do this is to reduce from 2.2 to 2.0 billion the number of people whose language we do not speak. The effort might be better spent in learning to speak English clearly and intelligibly, but that would lack subtlety.

Defenders of language study never seem very clear why cultural anthropology isn't a better path to self-understanding. Certainly, nobody has taught language in terms of general semantics outside of the department of linguistics. No doubt people who study languages understand foreign cultures better, but that might just be because people interested in foreign cultures study languages. The whole argument begins to sound like a suggestion that language should be studied because people who took a language in college are brighter than those who didn't go to college.

Just as the rationalizations are running out, the linguophiles come up with leadership and tradition. Harvard, you see, is a leader, and if it stopped requiring language skills of every student, all the schools of the country would decide that such studies were an utter waste of time and abolish them. Tradition reminds us that civilized men speak foreign languages--they have also, at varied times, worshipped kings, written bad poetry, and listened to folk songs.

In the end, though, it's not a matter of logic: as the author of the editorial I am opposing once put it, "It is just a matter of being civilized." Matter of taste, I guess.