Volume 38, Issue 12. Today is
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Volume 38, Issue 12. Today is
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Foreign language program is too little, too lateLEGEND'S VIEW
It has been proven that young children take in language easily. European schools take advantage of this. By age 12, most German students speak English fluently and have been exposed to a third and fourth language. American schools try to match European standards, but often do so when it’s too late. In America, the all-knowing school board decision-makers have decided that two years of foreign language in college will sculpt students into international experts. They are greatly mistaken. The motives of the school board are unclear and their method is virtually useless. The youth of America needs to learn a foreign language, and tagging a foreign language requirement onto a college degree is nothing more than an attempt to make up for the mistake of not teaching language to students when they are young. Colleges get government funding for offering culteral classes while pretending that that their goal is to produce well-rounded students. It’s hard to convince students that they need to learn another language when they see that every other country is speaking our language. Other countries should not have to facilitate our laziness. There is value in learning another language, but the classroom is not the best place to do so. Derek Carlon, 21, a political science major at MCC, spent two years in Venezuela. When he arrived, he hadn’t spoken the language and wasn’t familiar with the culture. He did participate in a ten- week crash course in spanish before he arrived, but as he was immersed in the culture he became fluent within four months of his arrival. It wasn’t two years of required college classes, it was four months of living there. Clearly, submersion is the best way to learn a language. A classroom will never be able to teach experience. When asked about the learning process, Carlon responded, "I just woke up one day and it clicked." Our biggest fear is that language is not the only subject that works like this. This means that what we’re learning is not only inapplicable and a waste of time, but it can also hold someone back from what can be learned in the real world. Are math classes, political science classes or economics classes applicable to the real world? Are students going to get jobs where they have to re-learn everything? Yes, it is beneficial to learn foreign languages. However, we need to learn them while we are young. We cannot be forced to become cultured. The obvious solution is to start at the bottom. Educational institutions need to place more of a focus on foreign languages at the elementary-level, and to ignore the urge to fix what is broken at the college-level. In a state as racially diverse as Arizona, particularly with such a large boom in our Hispanic population, urging bilingual education while children are young can not only benefit civil rights, it can benefit those young pupils who will need keen linguistic skills on the road to MCC. |
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