20, no. 1 (September 1988): 5-5
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An Anniversary Statement: A More Salubrious Climate
Frank G. Ryder
Frank G. Ryder, chair of the organizing committee and first president of ADFL, invited cooperation among department chairpersons and urged membership in the ADFL in his editorial entitled “A Call for Action”in the first issue of the Bulletin. Twenty years later, Ryder notes the following:
UNLESS the passage of years has dimmed our vision and muted our expectations, we should find the climate of 1988 in foreign language education more salubrious than that of 1968. The job market for PhD candidates seems to have thawed a bit, enrollments in foreign languages are rising in schools and colleges, and programs to encourage collaboration and articulation among the levels of education are sprouting rapidly. With the decline of the dollar and the burgeoning of trade deficits, the nation is at last facing its dependence on the rest of the world. Numerous state legislatures and boards of regents have mandated instruction in foreign languages; international issues are being integrated throughout the curriculum; candidates for the presidency have urged an end to our monolingual conceit. Among those originally seeking our highest office, present “front-runners” included, the level of competence in foreign languages (even multilingual ability) was without historical parallel. We stand to reap a secondary harvest from the welcome notion of many of those involved in the movement for literacy: that it is good to be able to read but also important to be able to read something .
As I understand it, however, the final paragraph of the old call for united action among chairpersons of foreign language departments still stands:
Possibilities of curricular improvement; expanded views of the range and meaning of FL study; ways of management appropriate to new administrative and budgetary contexts, new areas of study, new faculty roles; avenues for responsible student involvement and detours around the newly emerging hazards; development of rational policies for placement and articulation, major concentration, relations with other departments, graduate study, and teacher training; utilization of foreign study centers, staff from abroad, language houses—in these and a multitude of other challenges, department chairmen bear primary responsibility and can profit greatly from exchange of information and views, from mutual support, and from organized action. (3)
I should be inclined to add only a plea that in celebrating our enhanced status and cultivating further language skills we do not abandon substance. For us, too, it is important to read things of cultural and social value, to hear in foreign tongues the international news and the voice of the playwright, to speak with others not just about transient everyday matters but about more permanent concerns of thoughtful people, to write with more or less equal facility a pen-pal letter, a business report, or an essay on politics. Here and in all the particulars of the call for action the challenge is as great as ever. When Arkas tries to convince Iphigenie that she has accomplished much on Tauris, Goethe in his wisdom has her reply:
Das Wenige verschwindet leicht dem Blick,
Der vorwärts sieht, wieviel noch übrig bleibt.
The little done is quickly lost from sight
When one can see ahead and what's left to do.
The author is Kenan Professor Emeritus of German in the Department of GermanicLanguages and Literature at the University of Virginia.
© 1988 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 20, no. 1 (September 1988): 5-5 |
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