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Thursday, October 8, 2009

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Your Basic Public U Language Illiteracy

Signs are growing that public universities are lowering standards in order to cut costs. Today's news brings word that the Austin campus of the University of Texas is reducing the language requirement from four semesters to three or two.  The piece cites the Executive Director of the Modern Languages Association:
 Studying a language for only one year, she says, is "like taking one year of piano lessons or math. It's just not enough to give you all the immersion that you would need to get some lasting and significant benefit."
Very very true.
There are two issues here.  The first is that public school Americans are being relegated to a linguistic backwater in which they can't interact or compete with their global peers. Speaking one or two foreign languages is "part of being an educated person" as one Swiss colleague recently said to me.  UC's Educaton Abroad program sends 4000 of UC's 170,000 or so undergrads abroad, and maybe 8000 total go in some kind of short or long-term program.  What about the other 165,000?
The second is that universities don't necessary respond to budget cuts by sparing cheap programs and cutting expensive ones. They are as likely to cut to make cheap ones even cheaper.    For a possible harbinger of worse in UC to come, read this eloquent and graphic description of how this has already damaged languages and the humanities in Australia.

The privates are doing it to.  USC is now enrolling more students in its on-line teaching credential program, MAT@USC, and insisting that it is "providing an education that is fully equivalent to [its] on-ground master's program."

2 comments:

Kevin said...

Hasn't this fight already been lost at UC? Does any UC campus have a language requirement (other than the 2 years of high school foreign language in the admissions requirement)?

For that matter, how many of the humanities majors still have language requirements? If the majors don't require languages, how convincing is the case that foreign languages are central to education?

I say this as someone who values foreign language instruction highly. I was never required to take a foreign language, but did 4 years of German in high school, 2 years of Russian as an undergrad, and 2 years of Japanese as a grad student. (Sadly I've only retained a little of the German, and none of the Russian or Japanese.)

Anonymous said...

I've taught language and culture studies in Australia, and it's important to note that the situation described in the link here does NOT represent a general situation for all Australian language and humanities. In fact, if anything, Australian public education initiatives often far surpass our own, and should be considered as models. Larissa

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