Harvard's Global Perspective

For eight glorious weeks, students travel from around the globe--Mexico and Peru, France and Belgium, Germany and Denmark, China and Japan, Thailand and South Korea--to Harvard for summer school to learn English or improve the English they already know. They enthusiastically leave their comfort zones to live in Cambridge, a foreign land with foreign food and foreign people.

My interaction with international students has been enriching. My conversations with them have allowed me to learn first-hand what these students think about their countries' political, economic and educational systems. It is these kinds of insights that enable me to better understand world news events and to develop a more global perspective rather than a U.S.-centered point of view.

Interaction with international students occurs continuously throughout my day. For example, my roommate is from Taiwan and I usually eat breakfast with him in Kirkland House (assuming I'm not too tired from studying late the previous night). During lunch, I will eat with my Italian friends. During dinner, I will eat with some friends from Brazil or France or Japan. During my classes and during my entryway's sponsored study breaks--held about once every week--I will meet even more students from even more countries.

However, one of the most profound things I've learned from this plethora of international students is that learning languages (especially English) is vitally important. Why else would these students spend thousands of dollars to live in Cambridge for such a relatively short amount of time? Essentially, there is no other reason; these students are serious about learning English and they believe that living in the U.S. is the way to do it.

These international students know that as humanity advances into the 21st century, the importance of being able to speak more than one language will continually increase. Bilingualism and trilingualism will become more and more common, and speaking only one language will become less and less common.

Our increasingly interconnected world has become smaller and smaller with each passing day. With global bureaucratic institutions and events (the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the Olympic Games), with communication technology (the Internet, televisions, telephones) and transportation technology (airplanes, automobiles, ships), people from other nations are meeting face to face with each other more often and consequently having to relate to each other more often. This has been a powerful, inexorable global trend beginning since man first walked the earth, and it has become even more apparent in modern times.

What does this global trend mean for America's education system? Although I am not an educator, my personal experience learning foreign languages (I've studied French and Japanese) tells me that our educational system needs to stress not simply learning a foreign language but also mastery of that language: fluency, ideally, should be the goal. I believe students should be encouraged to become fluent in another language to travel to the country where that language is the official one and live there for eight weeks or longer, completely immersed in foreign food, newspapers and socialization with locals.

I believe students should also be extremely careful in selecting the foreign language they intend to learn so that the one they choose will make a significant difference in their lives--it should be a language they truly expect to use. After all, what good is it to learn a language if one will never communicate with it? Personally, I don't place much value in learning another language simply as an intellectual exercise.

By carefully choosing a language, students will have a greater desire to become fluent in it. By fluent, I mean very comfortable with the language so that it sticks in their brains for decades, so that they become comfortable using it (like brushing their teeth), so that the language means more to them than just a series of high school or college courses they took years ago.

And once the students become fluent, I believe they should be encouraged to maintain their ability to speak that language, so that ability doesn't become rusty or--even worse--dissipate into nothingness. Unfortunately, I know a lot of people who have put an awful lot of hours into learning a foreign language but no longer remember much of that language at all; "parlez vous Francais?" is about all they can say.

Kelly Fujiyoshi is a graduate student at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a special assistant with The Crimson.