A few weeks ago there was a piece in the Guardian about the decline of the teaching of languages and the need to do something about it. To which end there had been a Guardian conference, the premis of which seemed to be that there should be more language teaching. No question.
In my day, there were no foreign languages at primary school. This was followed by five lessons a week in each of French and Latin at secondary school, culminating five years later in the O level of the day. Then, for people like me doing sciencey A levels, there were one or two lessons of German a week, with the idea being, I think, to make us more rounded. As it turned out, I learned little German and that little has long gone. I learned rather more Latin, also the source of most of what I was taught about grammar. While I did once, as an adult, attempt to revive it during the then long commute, this did not come off and very little Latin is now left, apart from the grammar. French did rather better and survived, survived to the point that while my spoken French is not up to much, I can read French fiction, provided it does not contain too much modern slang. In the round, I think this amounts to a success and my life would be the poorer if what has survived had not. I faintly regret the loss of the German and rather less faintly the loss of the Latin - although I continue to carry dictionaries for both.
But where does that leave us now? Does this experience make a sufficient case for devoting what was a large amount of time to language?
My own feeling is that it does not. The first reason is that this is England and English is the top language. It is likely to remain the top language for some time, partly because it is an easy language to get along in and partly because a variant is the language of the US, which remains a top country for the time being. None of those conjugations and declensions which figure so large in Latin and in many if not most other modern languages. So lots of people are going to learn English. It might be bad manners, but we can get along without learning their languages, and being realistic, for most of us this is unlikely to be more than one or two. Too much else going on to be able to compete with the half dozen languages of Queen Elizabeth I.
The second reason is that there is so much else which we are expected to know about these days and so much more which we want our young adults to be able to do. So the squeeze is on and some things are going to have to give. Our first year undergraduate might not be able to decorate his essays with quotations from the classics in the way of a decently educated Victorian, but he can make a fair fist of a powerpoint presentation - a skill which I would argue, while dull, is a lot more use in the world of today. He does know how to pull down what he needs to know from the internet. He is likely to know more about people. If it is choice between knowing about evolution and knowing about the brothers Gracchi, evolution has it.
And to judge from the media, our young people are voting with their feet; they are not going to university to study languages in the numbers that they were. To the point that if you are a weaker candidate, language is the way to get in, rather in the way that divinity or land management used to be.
Another sort of evidence is in the books we read. A hundred years ago an author was quite likely to include small chunks of French or Latin, even of German or Italian, without offering a translation. Now that would not do at all.
But some people will continue to be multi-lingual, perhaps because more than one language is or was spoken at their home, perhaps because they were brought up in an international environment. I dare say there are more such people than there were. Perhaps because they got a Foreign Office crash course before being posted to Azerbaijan. And from little I know of them, these crash courses do work: the people doing them are able in the first place and have a strong incentive, the combination of which rolls over their advanced age. No need to devote huge chunks of school time to all this: it will all happen in some other way, sufficient for the purpose.
But then, as I type, my conviction wavers. I have, for example, often been struck at how much the later Roman republic - and, indeed the affairs of the brothers Gracchi - has or have to teach us about civics, with the added advantage that there is no Roman baggage; we don't don't have to get into a lather about how awful the Romans were (which in many ways they were), in the way which seems to be mandatory in, for example, the case of colonial administrators in India or that of owners of plantations in Jamaica. We can just study - and hopefully learn. At which point I drift off into the idea that it is the process of learning something substantial while at school which is important and that the subject of that learning is of secondary importance. At which point, maybe I had better leave the whole matter to educationalists, let them fight it out as best they can, and use the foregoing in the pub, where it belongs.
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