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THE usual arguments for teaching children a second language are practical. Competitiveness in a global economy, an informed citizenry capable of supporting a consistent foreign policy, tolerance and respect for cultural diversity at home, improved skill in English-all are persuasive arguments for language study. My aim, however, is different. I want to reflect philosophically and historically on the values of language learning.
None of the practical arguments would make much sense to a child. Children need a more immediate motive. The father of Pascal delighted his son by inventing a secret language they could share. One day the boy brought the distressing news that someone had found out their code and printed whole books in it. The father had to reveal his true secret: he had taught his son Greek. This anecdote is colored by the dream of Renaissance humanist schoolmasters that study could be turned into an effortless game. Our more suspicious age may draw a different lesson. The young Pascal may have sought a special intimacy with his father, perhaps even hoping to appropriate a paternal power. A child's motive for learning is likely to involve the allure of mysterious powers understood in emotional rather than in practical terms.
And what of teachers? The practical arguments may be convincing, but education is not merely an instrumental means to fit children into the adult slots current economic or social conditions define. Teachers usually find students' own motives more authentic, however passional. Some inner-city black children, taught Latin, gain a feeling of power from knowing something prestigious and exclusive. That feeling may be more valuable than the practical language skills they acquire. But while students' desires and interests motivate their study, no adult can responsibly assume that what children want and what they need are the same. Educators face the fateful difficulty of making one kind of argument to those who pay for education, another to students, and yet a third to colleagues. It remains the teacher's responsibility to speak for the liberal core that all education contains. Teachers do not simply find means to ends chosen by others-whether society, parents, or even students themselves. Teaching presupposes the humbling task of discerning what is good for the student, that is, what good the student is aiming at, even unaware.
This conclusion can be drawn from Plato's Phaedrus, a dialogue that examines among many other topics the teaching of rhetoric-what we would call “language arts.” Before encountering Socrates, the young Phaedrus had fallen under the spell of the sophist and teacher Lysias. To display the skill he teaches, Lysias has written a dazzling speech in the fictional persona of a lover, who ingeniously tries to seduce a boy by feigning indifference and then arguing that the boy will be better off yielding to one who does not love him than to one who does. Distracted at the conscious level by the paradoxical argument and polished style and at the unconscious level by the illicit theme, Phaedrus fails to realize that he has been fatally corrupted by Lysias, because corrupted intellectually and spiritually, not just sexually and physically. Socrates leads him to see that real love is a sort of madness, incapable of this cool, practical calculation of worldly advantage or power over another. Its origin and destination are divine, and the divine, for Socrates, means insight into the good. The art of the true teacher is to discern the path the student is following unaware toward the good and to help the student along that path. Though an authority based on discerning what is good for someone else is obviously fraught with moral danger, the teacher cannot shift this responsibility to the students, for they cannot yet see clearly for themselves what is good.
The question, then, is, What is the good in a child's learning a second language? We can begin by reflecting on our discovery that other languages exist. We can then pursue the stages of language acquisition that culminate in fluency. That final goal will lead us beyond the individual learner to the broader context of the Western cultural tradition.
An unfamiliar word in our own language has a phonic and syntactic shape we recognize. We know that it can be explained in simpler, more common words, so that learning it extends but does not disturb the semantic structure we have assimilated. But we experience a genuinely foreign word quite differently. Exotic to us, it may be ordinary to its native users. It has an alien semantic range that may be difficult to explain or fit into our language. The persisting alienness of even the most familiar foreign phrases shows in our hesitation about how to pronounce them: should we keep to their “correct” foreign sound or assimilate them to native patterns? In the United States, a country of immigrants, proper names retain this special feeling, since many of them are truly at home only in other languages. A foreign word presents a special problem, even when its meaning or use becomes familiar, for it transports us out of our own language into another, thus testifying that language is not one but many.
Young children often play the game of “speaking” another language. Even if they imitate no actual language, they are pretending to mean something, not merely babbling nonsense syllables. In Huckleberry Finn, Huck informs Jim that French people do not speak English. He offers an explanatory analogy: cows don't talk like horses. But Jim's reply is forceful: a Frenchman is not a cow but a man, and if he's a man, why doesn't he talk like a man? This exchange underscores something essential. Children carry on a “conversation” in a mock tongue, pretending not only to mean something but to exchange meaning. To know a language is to join the others who know it. In his training manual for preachers, On Christian Doctrine, Augustine ponders whether one should study pagan authors (bk. 2, chs. 20–24). Their culture and values offend the Christian, yet one must learn Greek and Latin from them in order to read Scriptures and the church fathers. Astrology is an invention of the devil, and in learning its terms, even for the pious purpose of explaining something in Scripture, have we not entered into a compact with the devil, even if only the social compact that grants these words their meanings? Since words have meaning only for a group of people, we may need to be careful about the company words make us keep.
Consciousness of the diversity of languages encourages a reorientation toward one's native language and toward language more generally. We may come to understand language as a stream of articulated sound used by a group of people to convey shared meanings. But language only exists as particular languages. They are arranged for us in concentric circles radiating from the familiar to the alien, the native to the foreign, the comprehensible to the unintelligible-circles that chart our position on the map of the human language world. Our circles overlap with circles centered on other individuals. Experience of the foreign thus brings a recognition of personal limits. We must not neglect the negativity of this moment. Many adults are never reconciled to this evidence of the limits of the world of meaning, values, and social life that the mastery of language has brought them. Their attitude was colorfully expressed by “Ma” Ferguson, the first woman governor of Texas: “If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.” Our attachment to the native language in which we dwell has perhaps never been more powerfully expressed than in Shakespeare's Richard II, where Mowbray, banished for life, bursts out:
The language I have learnt these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo;
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cas'd up
Or, being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony.
Within my mouth you have enjail'd my tongue,
Doubly portcullis'd with my teeth and lips;
And dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance
Is made my jailer to attend on me.
I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,
Too far in years to be a pupil now.
What is thy sentence then but speechless death,
Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?
(1.3.159–73)
The controversial campaign to declare English the “official language” of the United States feeds on the shock of this discovery. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle recommends giving one's style distinctiveness by using unusual or dialect terms. But he warns that to use too many such terms turns one's speech into a jargon. The audience will not only find this unintelligible but, he implies, see the speaker as an alien who forfeits the right to address the public on affairs of common concern (3.2.1–5.1404b). If America is a land of immigrants, it is a land of immigrants who overwhelmingly yearned to become monolingual English speakers, sometimes at great personal and emotional cost. Nevertheless, for many reasons, we ought to see our fellow citizens who speak other languages as a vital and positive resource. Given the power of economic and social forces, not only is the primacy of English not threatened by these immigrants, but deliberate steps will have to be taken to preserve the current levels of fluency in diverse languages.
But let me return to the individual child. For my point is that teachers must reflect seriously on the challenge language learning offers the student. I remember very well the frustration I felt when I first studied Russian and stared in bewilderment at a printed word, realizing suddenly but only after a painful effort that these alien and uncanny shapes transliterated the familiar loanword concert. Surveys of work on literacy in Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy and Jack Goody and Ian Watt's “Consequences of Literacy” spell out the far-reaching alteration literacy brings about in individuals and societies. Encountering another language may have equally significant effects. Unless we grasp how intensely the diversity of languages brings us up against our human limits, we will miss the existential depth of the common resistance to language learning. Yet precisely this depth and seriousness make language study essential to education. Learning another language is not simply one of the technical skills that society demands. Aristotle defines human beings as “political animals,” not because they gather in herds like bees or cattle, but because they have language, which enables them to share a common perception of what is good and bad, helpful and harmful ( Politics 1.1.10.1253a8). In our own century, philosophers from Ernst Cassirer to Martin Heidegger, from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Jacques Derrida, have sought in language what is basic to human being. Language study should be a part of education from the very beginning because language is essential to what we are.
Because an encounter with a foreign language is closely linked to the recognition of our own limits, it makes us examine our identity, and this experience is the content of all education worthy of the name. In Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer describes the general structure of experience in just these terms (346–62). Whenever we discover that things are not as we had assumed they were, we are led not simply to correct an error but to see that we always move within the limits of premises we are never fully aware of and that in particular situations other premises may become valid. It is not enough to grasp this experience as a mere theory. Each of us must feel for ourselves what it means “to learn from our mistakes,” or as Greek tragedy puts it, to grow wise through suffering. Such suffering cannot be avoided, for those who do not learn their own limits suffer from hubris, an arrogant pride and self-sufficiency that life punishes ruthlessly. When we feel the limits and insufficiencies of what we know and are, we open ourselves to new perspectives, new insights, new realities. For Plato, knowledge begins in questioning, but questioning begins in a recognition of our own ignorance and need to learn. Someone who has become “experienced” is not more dogmatic, sure of everything and closed to other possibilities, but, on the contrary, more tolerant: experience opens one to further experience. It is deeply revealing that a person who has learned one foreign language finds it easier to learn another and even easier to learn yet another. As thinking beings, we do not simply have our thoughts, we are our thoughts. Language is not just a means of thought but its very body. The encounter with another language is the most fundamental encounter with the limits of our own thinking and being and with the possibility of other ways of thinking and of being human. It is finally the most intimate possible encounter with the other people to whom a “foreign” language is “native.” There can be no more important experience in education.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X powerfully testifies to this. As a young man in prison, Malcolm suddenly realized what made some men dominators and others permanent victims: it was the power conferred by a command of language. From that day, he worked to acquire verbal skills, though at first he used them only exploitatively, as a con artist. Gradually drawn to the Black Muslim movement, he developed a broader awareness of the moral and political responsibilities his talents and intelligence imposed. The climax of this conversion was a pilgrimage to Mecca. Knowing not a word of Arabic, once again a literal “infant” (Latin, “one who cannot speak”), forced to rely on the kindness of strangers, he encountered the deepest ethical reality of language: it is not a device merely to tell others what we want or to exercise power over them; it is not simply a demand or a command. Rather, it lets us hear other human beings as human and thereby find our own humanity. From his experiences emerged a vision of humanity, diverse yet one, whose social and political implications Malcolm was only beginning to articulate when an assassin cut short his life.
Reflection on our encounter with another language thus leads us to deep human issues. Equally rich is the experience that passes between the first discovery that other languages exist and that moment-one few of us will reach-when we find ourselves “at home” in another language. Reflection on this second stage has important consequences for pedagogy. The path to fluency is long, but Americans are impatient by nature, and an age of television does not encourage concentrated or sustained effort. Even the public leaders who call for language learning are with rare exceptions monolingual. Every teacher has encountered the sometimes bitter resentment of students who have traveled to another country and found how little mastery their two or three years of formal language study gained them. When students grow discouraged, good teachers-because they are sensitive to students' feelings-may lose heart for imposing a labor that rarely attains its stated goal. Teachers need to find arguments that convince not only others but themselves that there is intrinsic value in the laborious intermediate stage of language study, even when fluency is not attained.
The value I want to claim is conventional and will make many educators uncomfortable: the effort of studying hard subjects is “good for your character.” This is the sort of cliché social science researchers delight in demolishing. But we should be cautious about discarding an opinion that has seemed obvious to the common sense of humankind for many centuries. Is it possible that an important truth might here elude not just critique but even confirmation by the recently invented methods of social science research? Everyone knows that whoever persists in a course of behavior, even a trivial one, acquires habits of thinking and acting that become half-conscious and stubborn constituents of character. It is easy to say that in encountering another language, we become aware of the others who speak it. But that awareness is abstract and void without a long and concretely detailed process to fill it in. In much the same way, the elaborate rules and rituals of etiquette fill out concretely the valid but vague ideal of being considerate of others. Those who love, love each other in detail. To submit oneself to the discipline of studying another language in detail is a deeply ethical act. You cannot doubt this truth once you have, while traveling, seen the pleased face of a “native” whose language you unexpectedly spoke, even fumblingly. Athletic skills are trivial, but our society sees value in the persistence required to master them. Surely we can win recognition that persistence in language study, where something far more important is at stake, is correspondingly more important. Even if we never master another language, our study has the high virtue of treating with care and respect the invisible others whose language it is.
Augustine already recognized that no one learns to speak by learning and applying rules ( On Christian Doctrine, bk. 4, ch. 3). Yet, for over two millennia, languages were normally studied out of rule books. And, in fact, everyone at least occasionally in speaking or writing consciously adheres to some rule of grammar or style. What this teaches us is that the use of rules is not simply instrumental. Grammar books and dictionaries elaborate the reality that in second-language study the language becomes an object of conscious reflection. While the “oral-aural” method has proved its effectiveness, the refusal to cite or discuss rules of grammar with students can become a rigid dogma that constricts the students' grasp not only of a particular language but of the general nature of language. The dialectic between usage and grammar is and ought to be part of any study of language.
Through that dialectic one may come to realize that one's native language can also be made the object of a conscious reflection. To “improve” one's mastery of one's own language is a rather strange idea. It means bringing one's language into harmony with standards or principles that do not merely follow the dialect of a dominant social group but rather derive their authority from an explicit awareness of the language's resources for meaning. This awareness is most acute, of course, in literature and especially in poetry. Poetry is like a foreign language within our native language, one that makes actual the possibilities of language latent or obscured in everyday talk. Poetic language becomes, so to speak, “hypergrammatical,” through special devices of meter and sound, diction and syntax. Students who have come to terms with the strangeness of language in another tongue are much readier to come to terms with the strangeness of their own tongue in a poet like Shakespeare or Gerard Manley Hopkins.
There is a certain ethics in our bearing toward language itself. This is an elusive matter, and probably behind it lies respect for the invisible community to which language always belongs. But just as a racist joke is an unacceptable injury even when told outside the hearing of any member of the ridiculed group, casual and thoughtless abuses of language are an injury to the whole body of those who use it as well as to those who have used it in the past and to those who will use it in the future. To learn another language, to struggle to speak it “correctly” and to follow its rules, even where they differ most from those of our own language and seem to us most unintelligible and strange, is to discover that in every language there is something that calls for our observance and respect. Students who resent a teacher's correcting errors and infelicities of English see at once the legitimacy of correcting the errors they make in another language. In learning to respect another language, at least some students will learn to respect their own.
Though few children will reach fluency, that remains the aim orienting language study, and we must reflect on it too. To attain fluency is to experience most fully the productivity of the venture beyond one's native way of thinking. Contemporary teachers rightly stress the age-old insight that learners have not exhausted what our capacity to learn another language reveals until they have come to think and act, to live directly, in a second language. To learn another language thoroughly is to see that every language is adequate to express the entire human experience of the world. Language differs from ethics or politics or even mathematics in that here claims of universal validity are senseless. No language is superior to another, and none can pretend to be the universal standard on which all others must be modeled.
And yet, if every language is adequate to express our human experience of the world, how would anything be lost if all disappeared into a single world language? Indeed, is this not the inevitable outcome of “global communications”? Is not a single language demanded for the efficient functioning of a global economy? “Modernization” means that technology and scientific rationality progressively reduce social life to a uniform pattern. Conscious efforts to preserve the diversity of local cultures have proved futile. Insofar as educational theory stresses “relevance” or “preparing students for modern life,” it colludes in eroding the traditional humanistic values that legitimated studying other languages and cultures.
We need to see that learning other languages is not simply an interim inconvenience while we wait for a global monolingualism to emerge. The historical contingency and isolation of particular communities, which created linguistic diversity, are not just obstacles to communication. To attain fluency is rather to discover positively that every language always fits itself to the unique contours of its users' historical experience in a way that preserves and extends them. To Johann Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt especially we owe the insight that the diversity of languages represents a diversity of worldviews. But worldviews are not just arbitrarily different ways of looking at identical phenomena. Languages incarnate possibilities for thinking and meaning that can be generated in no other way than by the historical vicissitudes that also generate diversity. In Edmund Husserl's fruitful metaphor, every language “sediments” the experiences its speakers have with one another and with the natural world toward which they have found their own orientation (361). The diversity of languages reveals an essential limit of the individual creativity or inventiveness so highly prized by technological culture. When we learn a language, we enter another way of thinking that is already “there,” already home to other human beings. Every language is an enduring historical reality that embodies a tradition rich and complex beyond any power of deliberate individual invention.
Fluency in another language is a specific achievement of our human being: the opening of and to another world, which yet remains one with the only world we have. “Living” languages are worlds that are still open, like our own, and we can encounter their inhabitants face to face. But a “dead” language has a special value. Anthropologists remind us of how many languages have perished. A few of these persist, however, withdrawn into a written record. To cross the fragile bridge that links us to others who have shared the human adventure, to enter a world that lives only insofar as our imagination is nourished on disciplined recollection, is to participate in that solidarity through memory; this participation fulfills a deep and defining human need and forms the very core of historical consciousness. There is a unique value in becoming aware that there was a time when English did not yet exist and that there may come a time when it will exist no more. The truth is that no language is dead; it is we who may be dead to the life it shelters.
The full meaning of fluency cannot be grasped without the experience of translation. The odyssey must include homecoming. The highest value of language learning is not found in leaving one's native language behind but in discovering-one might even dare to say creating-the common ground of shared meaning. The act of translating is one way to seek this common ground. Translated meanings have a peculiar status. They do not transcend language, but they do not belong strictly to one language or the other. Any truly significant translated work, even a scientific or a technical one, however well translated, subtly manifests its alien origin. Translations reveal something about a work that is difficult or impossible to see within the original language. And, reciprocally, the strain our language undergoes to accommodate this thrust from beyond reveals something about our own spiritual world. In “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin points to this double power of translation. The mastery of another language can generate playful exuberance with one's native tongue, an exuberance felt throughout our greatest literature, from Shakespeare to Joyce. English-language poets from Chaucer to Pound, W. S. Merwin, Robert Bly, and many other contemporaries have regularly engaged in translation. Just as in a work like Their Eyes Were Watching God, by the black novelist Zora Neale Hurston, dialect creates meanings beyond the reach of “standard” speech, so English, as it spreads throughout the world, has begun to reflect local experience and, in the hands of poets and novelists, to enrich the language by diversifying it.
Language instruction, even at an early stage, should therefore include translating. Certainly students should learn to speak directly in another language. But they should also experience the fruitful dialectic between languages that translating engages. Translating is not simply a technical process of finding the equivalent word or syntactic structure. It teaches us to appreciate the irreducible ambiguity and many-sidedness of every significant meaning. The understanding of English-both the language and its literature-would be greatly enhanced if there were a body of students prepared to examine the great English translations. Translating should be seen not as a way of eliminating or reducing the “obstacle” of an alien tongue but as the art of opening an interchange between languages, an interchange whose loss would be a disastrous abridgment of our humanity.
Here we transcend the subjective perspective of the language learner and enter into the larger context of the Western cultural tradition. From a linguistic point of view, what characterizes that tradition is its linguistic multiplicity-indeed, we should speak of Western cultures and traditions. Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization has shown the biases that led eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars to suppress recognition of Greek interaction with the eastern Mediterranean world. Moreover, antiquity is not only Greek but Roman. The transformation of Greek culture into an educational model meant that anyone could master that culture through study, creating the inevitable presumption for Romans that Greece was a model for all human culture and education. Roman economic and military superiority was counterbalanced by a sense of cultural inferiority. What we should learn from this is not only that cultural prestige confers power, but that it confers a particular kind of power.
The linguistic mix becomes even more variegated at the confluence of paganism and Christianity. The Jewish community at Alexandria had already recast the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek Septuagint. Teachings spoken by Jesus in Aramaic were disseminated throughout the Mediterranean in texts composed in Greek. Paradoxically, as Roman hegemony declined, a Latin Vulgate translated and transmitted this collection of scriptures in the form of Old and New Testaments. The dominant religious tradition in the West would never lose the double focus implicit in the term Judaeo-Christian or its deeply ambivalent relation to the Greco-Roman culture embedded in its scriptural languages.
Throughout the Middle Ages, fresh diversities mark every cultural renaissance. Germanic strains enter from the Carolingian Holy Roman Emperors-a richly paradoxical title. Latin theology reaches its peak only when Aristotelian thought-not merely transmitted but fruitfully transformed through Arabic philosophy-flows into it. What we call the Renaissance renews European culture by exposing it to multiple tensions: “barbarous” Scholastic versus “pure” classical Latin, Latin versus Greek, pagan antique texts versus Christian scriptures, artificial and learned versus popular and vernacular culture. By the seventeenth century, when Latin had been driven out of political and economic life, cultured men and (especially) women could peremptorily demand a vernacular literature that reflected modern life and displaced antique models. Yet vernacular literature remained in fruitful tension with the classics, with the continuing storehouse of values and insights secular elites needed even in a new age.
Practical motives have doubtless always played a role in language study. But in the call that begins in the seventeenth century for a “modernized” scientific, commercial, and utilitarian curriculum, language study first loses its fundamentally humanistic legitimation and then discovers too late that it has no other secure basis. Bacon, Descartes, Hume, and Thomas Paine mark stages in the skepticism a scientific, empirical mind directs against any claim that at least some wisdom is accessible only through the study of language. While the demand for a learned clergy and the traditions of civic humanism kept classical studies central to college curricula in England and America throughout most of the nineteenth century, the “practical” spirit triumphed in the idea of the American land-grant university. Antiscientific humanists like F.R. Leavis and Norman Foerster strategically emphasized English studies, in the hope that an English curriculum would be self-evidently indispensable and could suffice to preserve a humanistic, “moralist” core in higher education. But, against their intent, the focus on a more “relevant” national literature, whether English or American, leads inevitably to a further narrowing of contemporary literature and thence to the products of a mass “culture industry” (to use Horkheimer and Adorno's term), a trend that has dissipated the tensions that defined the humanistic tradition.
This sketchy historical survey may remind us that until very recently early education focused almost exclusively on what we would call “language arts” and that the language studied was normally chosen because of its religious and cultural significance-that is, because it was felt that in studying language, students gained access to truths that had to be learned from other cultures and from tradition and could not be invented by the individual. As I have tried repeatedly to suggest, recent political and economic arguments for language study seem to me treacherous ground for educators. Will the impetus the trade balance has given to studying Japanese prove more durable than the transitory impetus Sputnik gave to the study of Russian? As educators, we must make a commitment to language study that is based on a humanistic understanding of its value, an understanding that is more lasting and less crass than the short-term and shortsighted rhetoric of crisis. The value of language study is fundamentally ethical. It is an act of self-restraint, an acknowledgment of other people and of the validity of their perspective on, and way of talking about, our common human experience. In contemporary global terms, the justification of language study must rest on a clear insight into the reality that by opening ourselves to other perspectives, we are not doing a favor to those who hold them and still less seeking some ultimately commercial or political advantage. Openness to others is required if we are to realize our own humanity. The specific virtue of language study is that it gives this universal ethical principle a particularized content we might otherwise overlook. Another person's identity is no abstract universal but is rooted in a particular language and the culture that language shelters-a culture whose difference must be acknowledged and valued.
My historical sketch aims to bring out that this insight also lies at the heart of the Western tradition. At the beginning of the tradition, in Homer's Iliad, the Trojans are already fully human, and not mere enemies, so that Hector is just as heroic as Achilles. In the earliest Greek tragedy we have, the Persian Women, Aeschylus employs the perspective of the defeated Persians rather than that of the Greeks to examine the military victory that inaugurates Athens's greatness. Aeschylus chooses this moment not for an ethnocentric celebration but as a reminder to his fellow Greeks that their victory is due to the gods, who punish those who arrogantly overstep human limits. His lesson is that our humanity is inseparable from this recognition of personal and cultural limits. Even Vergil's Aeneid, which attributes to Rome a civilizing mission that justifies its conquest of other peoples, counts without palliation and mourns without reserve the price those who must vanish-Dido and her Carthaginians, Turnus and his allies-pay for that achievement. I cannot speak for other cultures, but certainly the West is not a unified, exclusive culture confined to a single language; it is marked by a linguistic consciousness that is always at least double and by the gathering of a multiplicity of cultures that encounter, clash, blend, and divide again in kaleidoscopic fashion. The good a student attains by studying another language simultaneously roots the student in what is essential to the Western tradition. For an educated person to know only one language is treason to that tradition.
The author is Professor of English at the University of Iowa.
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© 1990 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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