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March 19, 2005
Multilingualism rationale #1
Getting more Americans to speak more languages is the goal of a yearlong initiative promoting such learning in government, business, and higher education. The Senate endorsed the effort Feb. 17 with a resolution noting that only 9.3 percent of Americans speak both their native language and another language fluently, according to the Census Bureau, compared with 52.7 percent of Europeans.
''We really need an action plan here," said Marty Abbott, who is coordinating the program, known as ''Year of Languages," for the Virginia-based American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, a national advocacy group for language teachers on all levels. ''The world has fundamentally changed. And with that fundamental change, we've got to change our attitudes about the learning of other languages."
Sounds great, doesn't it? But wait—there's more:
The country's need for more language learning was demonstrated immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, when the Justice Department reported a backlog of untranslated documents and recordings related to terrorism investigations, while failures in intelligence and diplomacy were tied in part to a longtime lack of qualified linguists.This is not the world of my choosing. This is not the direction in which I want to see the Democratic party go. I want choices. Please. I understand and don't argue with the government's need for information (though I have many arguments about the ways in which that information is being pursued), but I hate seeing 9/11 used as a rationale for security issues becoming the first rationale for all educational efforts. A recognition of the U.S. as a multilingual country? Fabulous. That recognition being funneled to the effort to monitor and contain all those dangerous Others? Reprehensible.
Posted by senioritis at March 19, 2005 06:28 PM