Hurrah to The Durango Herald for publishing the story headlined “Guten Tag, Durango” (June 12) about the Guatemalan students’ visit to Durango on the front page of the paper; and three hurrahs to the kids – one for each language these young linguists from Guatemala speak – and to their enlightened teachers and trip organizers who obviously think it is important to open children’s minds to the world beyond their homeland.
What a shame that we in Durango cannot even begin to compare ourselves to these young polyglots. It has been seven years since I retired from the Modern Languages Department at Fort Lewis College, and, almost as soon as I left, the German program was discontinued – Latin, Japanese, Navajo, half of the French program, and even some Spanish courses followed. All of it into the waste pile, and all the while, we are touting “education for globalization” and advertising Fort Lewis as a “liberal arts” college.
It is a farce! It is misleading the public and short changing the students currently enrolled. It is also limiting our graduates’ future options because most universities require proficiency in a foreign language as a precondition for acceptance into many of their graduate programs.
It is a crying shame. Anyone who has ever studied or taught foreign languages knows this joke: Q.: What is a trilingual? A: A person who speaks three languages Q: What is a bilingual? A: A person who speaks two languages. Q: What is a monolingual? A: An American.
And our highly educated college administrators play into this mind-set. What about the intrinsic benefits of knowing a foreign language? What about the carry over into other fields of study? A language student’s mind becomes more discriminating, better at solving problems and, on the whole, more tolerant of other ways of thinking. Knowing a foreign language can be empowering, not only because it improves the learners’ first language, but also primarily because it opens up a whole new universe of thought. We are denying our students access to another world that might help them understand their own better.
Ingrid Ryan
Durango
