« Delicious Sugar | Main | Fear of Crime » The Snob Factor09 Jul 2008 11:42 am Barack Obama thinks America's schools should be the best in the world, and that means doing as good a job as other countries do of teaching our children foreign languages. This, it seems, makes him a snob in the eyes of The Weekly Standard (via Julian Sanchez) where they apparently feel that a healthy respect for the common man requires a vote for John McCain and a willingness to settle for low-performing public services. Don't hope for a better life, accept mediocrity! Comments (51)
What we need to do is make all them dam furners speak and write English any dam way. We don't need all these dam different chicken scratches around the world when the best ideas what ever been all happened in English. AMERICAN English, not that gay England stuff neither. 
The Weekly Standard is running a new offer - a free torch and pitchfork with every subscription.
If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!
What we need to do is make all them dam furners speak and write English any dam way. El Cid, I'm more concerned about the fact that many of our natural born citizens lack reasonable reading and writing skills. It's unbelievable. I work in the tech field and some of our hires can't write a basic description, can't form an outline, don't understand punctuation, and are completely dependent upon their/there/they're spell-checkers.
Ignorant people are easy to exploit. People who aren't ignorant enough to be easily exploited will be called "snobs," "elitist," "cultural elites," and, when necessary, "communists," so that those who are ignorant enough to be easily exploited will not be contaminated, which hurts profitability. This is what big "c" conservatism means in the USA. All other things are minutiae.
LFC is right. I hesitated before adding "write", knowing that it is of necessity elitist big head ivory tower fancy pants latte sippin' nonsense to expect people to write any dam how.
Apollo's motto? All things in moderation including moderation. We've succeeded at mediocrity. We're overdosing on it. Gorging on competence and transparency would be a nice change.
I took 4 years of German in HS and 3 semesters in college. But The Weekly Standard and The Corner have opened my eyes - I'm just a lousy, latte sipping, liberal, elitist snob. And since Deutsch was the language of Der Fuehrer, perhaps I'm Hitler as well - that's probably what Jonah would say. And that elitist high school I attended (the one that starts with a "K" on this list of most elitist high schools in NJ) actually REQUIRED all students to take at least 2 years of a foreign language. At least I took the less popular option - most of the rest of the snobs I went to school with chose that dirty Mexican language. America - Striving to Underachieve!
I took 4 years of German in HS and 3 semesters in college. But The Weekly Standard and The Corner have opened my eyes - I'm just a lousy, latte sipping, liberal, elitist snob. And since Deutsch was the language of Der Fuehrer, perhaps I'm Hitler as well - that's probably what Jonah would say. And that elitist high school I attended (the one that starts with a "K" on this list of most elitist high schools in NJ) actually REQUIRED all students to take at least 2 years of a foreign language. At least I took the less popular option - most of the rest of the snobs I went to school with chose that dirty Mexican language. America - Striving to Underachieve!
Apollo's motto? All things in moderation including moderation. We've succeeded at mediocrity. We're overdosing on it. Gorging on competence and transparency would be a nice change. Sorry if this posts twice, server error.
I'm more concerned about the fact that many of our natural born citizens lack reasonable reading and writing skills. You didn't figure this out by reading blog comments? MattY gets a lot of flack for his typos, but that's more about his own sloppiness and lack of care. Some commenters, however, never seem to have learned the basics of English spelling and syntax. People will laugh at themselves for being a "bad speller" as though it's akin to saying, "I'm not good at skiing" or some other tangential, specialized skill. Can you imagine, however, if Obama said, "some people make it through school and can't even spell or put a decent sentence together" ? He'd be pilloried for insulting the voting public. (yes, this post probably contains some spelling or grammar mistake. feel free to point it out.)
who nedz 2 rite when u can txt nsted?
Remember, this is the Weekly Standard, a political journal with a print circulation of 83,000 per week. Who the fuck are they to cry elitist?
The hilarious thing is, even if American schools did NOTHING, the U.S. would have a pretty substantial pool of bilingual speakers simply from speaking their parents' language at home and English at school. But many schools in the U.S. actually discourage parents from speaking their native tongue and guilt families into speaking "Inglish" instead. This despite countless studies that show bilingual kids do at least as well (and probably better) in school in later grades compared to English-only kids, whereas kids exposed to broken English at home are worse off than kids exposed to a fluent language--any language--from an early age.
While we could certainly do a better job encouraging language training and carrying it out, I think one of the main reasons we as a country struggle with learning other languages is geographic. In Europe, one is usually relatively close to a significant population of people who speak another language, meaning high levels of exposure to the language in its natural environment, the type of immersion known to be most effective in learning a language. In the US, most people are generally isolated from concentrated populations of foreign language speakers, with the exception of Spanish in the southwest. If Coloradoans and Kansans and Nebraskans all spoke different languages, you'd find a lot of bilingual and trilingual individuals in the region.
You know, I should confess that despite having studied a few different foreign languages in my day, I only speak 1 foreign language with any level of competence: the one spoken among my family who came from the country that I visit very frequently, giving me an opportunity to use it a lot. You're really not going to know a language well unless you study it for years and then spend several months to a year using it abroad. In a country of 300 million people, it's unlikely we could do anything like that on a large scale, except maybe with Spanish.
How many years has it been since we declared independence from England? And yet we still call our language after them. Stop calling it "English" - we're not Brits, for chrissakes! Call it "American"! Speak American!
(yes, this post probably contains some spelling or grammar mistake. feel free to point it out.) I have no problem with a bit of sloppiness in this type of forum because it's casual and quick, but I have a fit when customer and company facing documents look like they were written as part of a 6th grade essay assignment. Does that make me elitist?
Who the fuck are they to cry elitist? Who are they? They're the ones laughing at anyone stupid enough to believe it. Laughing all the way to the bank.
This is the same sort of attitude that the right has been professing in order to get out the Bubba vote: it glorifies "good enough" and simplicity, and then tries to conflate that with "good ol' Middle American values". It's the same sort of blissful ignorance that people embrace when they profess that global climate change is no big deal and intelligent design is a valid scientific theory. Honestly, what's so great about being willfully dumb?
As I was waiting for the appearance of Suze Orman on "Larry King" last night, I caught a bit of Mitt Romney's appearance on "Hannity & Colmes." Obama's comments on students learning foreign languages was the topic of discussion, with Hannity claiming it showed he was insulting and mocking average Americans. I wouldn't be surprised if they cut the clip short so as to distort what Obama said, but no matter, Obama's position is smart on so many levels. But leaving aside whatever economic and intellectual benefits learning additional languages may have, even if it's nothing more than a vanity exercise, it's like he's challenging us to prove how smart we can be. He's asking us to prove that we can be better than we out now. Will McCain do the same? Remind me, who is the grown up in this race?
Socctty, it pisses off the guy leaning on the wall in the country club with his cigarette and hot date. That's what's so great about it. I'd be satisfied if people could learn English. I constantly get emails at work that pluralize everything by adding an apostrophe. Or some that are so filled with misspellings and just plain erroneous word choice that they are rendered incoherent, and I'm the one made to feel incompetent when I ask for clarification.
A smart public school system would offer spanish, french, arabic and chinese language courses. Ditch german and italian (which were offered in my NJ high school)
Oh, by the way, I learned more about ENGLISH grammar from my high school GERMAN teacher than I did from my high school English teachers. I have a feeling this might be true of many other people who have studied a foreign language.
So much for trying to be grammatically correct. One of the last sentences should read "...we can be better than we are now."
it glorifies "good enough" and simplicity, and then tries to conflate that with "good ol' Middle American values" Regardless of how conservative members of my family have become in their old age, I simply can't become a Republican, because I was raised with absolute disdain for mediocrity and an obsession with the primary of learning (not just getting a degree, though I have several). I'm always going to be revulsed by the political party that tries to conflat "good enough" with "good ol' Middle American values." The only reason that middle americans live in middle america, anyway, is because their ancestors felt that their lives would be much better if they moved to what is now considered "middle america," rather than staying where they were and deciding it was "good enough." But, look, the willfully and proudly mediocre vote, too. Someone has to be representing them. And some people want future generations to have better opportunities and do greater things. And some people consider the prospect of future generations having those opportunities to be an insult to those who didn't have or even want them.
I've always thought equating good education with elitism was a bad tactic for the GOP. Who doesn't want their kids to get a good education? For that matter, who doesn't want to live in a country where people in general are getting good educations? This just seems like a very tough argument to sell to anyone other than your choir, even before you get to the fact that the individuals making these arguments are all raving hypocrites, seeing as how so many of them attended expensive schools and/or are paying for their kids to do the same.
I'm sorry, but teaching foreign languages--with the possible exception of Spanish--should just not be a priority for the public school system. Those hours can be much more productively spent teaching more math/science and English writing skills. Many people vastly over-estimate the utility of knowing additional languages, particularly to the level that you'll be able to get without real immersion. It's a cool novelty, and occasionally a way to get dates, but hardly a bankable skill. The discussion about Americans schools needing to teach more foreign languages is mostly a result of multilingual educated Europeans using their language skills as point of differentiation to embarrass educated Americans.
A smart public school system would offer spanish, french, arabic and chinese language courses. Ditch german and italian (which were offered in my NJ high school)
Ditch the French....not enough speakers worldwide, unless you add languages like Hindi and Indonesian (230-250 million speakers) which have more speakers world wide than French does. On the flip side, one of my colleagues was talking with one of his students the other day. The student was compalining about the reading and writing she was having to do for his first year college US hitory course. So my colleague asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She replied immediately, "A teacher." The sad thing is that this students attitude is far from uncommon. Another colleague told us that some of his students spnt 20 minutes yesterday compalining that they'd beeen assigned to read a six page story in their literature class.
Needless to say, MattY is using a strawman argument and not accurately representing BHO's full comments. I used to think BHO had only a 0.1% chance of becoming president. Now I think there's a fair chance he'll drop out within a month "for the good of the Party".
TW Andrews, actually, by your standard, we should return to universal education in Latin: the thing is that learning Latin teaches a large number of useful concepts about structure and grammar that are invaluable, but the speaking skills you derive from them will never be used. It's thus more useful than learning a foreign language that isn't as complex, when you're not going to speak it, anyway. (I'm not being completely facetious, here. I think that the understanding of language you gain from learning a foreign language is fundamental to an education. And if one can't make the case for learning a "useful" language, it might as well be latin). djerl, the case for learning French isn't in shear number of speakers, but in terms of odds that you might find it useful. True, French doesn't have a lot of speakers as compared to Hindi or Indonesian. But the number of opportunities you might have to speak that language is going to be larger than the number of opportunities you'll have to speak Hindi. I've found myself in France and Montreal far more times than I've found myself in India or Indonesia. Plus, if a foreigner doesn't speak English, odds are decent he might speak French as an alternative.
It's a cool novelty, and occasionally a way to get dates, but hardly a bankable skill. Ah, TW Gradgrind is an engineer, I take it? The time to teach languages to kids is long before you start thinking about 'bankable skills'. And let's just say the chance of Obama becoming president is far greater than the chance of Whack O'Mole Kelly leaving his bedroom before the election.
Next thing you know, that snob Obama will start expecting our kids to learn math and writing too.
Languages aren't taught to be bankable. For as long as I've been paying attention, and this is an interest of mine, foreign language study has been dominated by (1) European languages, and (2) a literary emphasis. This appeals to some people, but it puts a great many others off. Those who are put off aren't necessarily stupid. Perhaps because of the way languages are taught here, many US-based employers don't go looking for Americans who have learned other languages. Foreign languages as studied by Americans are often seen as airy-fairy and impractical... the sort of thing you study to avoid doing anything real. Instead, employers look for people from other countries who have learned English in the course of picking up some technical skills. These people may also have some connection to their former countries that gives them an "in" when doing business overseas. Now, does it have to be that way? Arguably not. But how much static will you get from the MLA if you try to change it?
by your standard, we should return to universal education in Latin: the thing is that learning Latin teaches a large number of useful concepts about structure and grammar that are invaluable, but the speaking skills you derive from them will never be used. I'd agree with that, to some extent. I'd still favor more math and science over Latin, but agree that it teaches a lot of cool things about language. It's thus more useful than learning a foreign language that isn't as complex, when you're not going to speak it, anyway. (I'm not being completely facetious, here. I think that the understanding of language you gain from learning a foreign language is fundamental to an education. And if one can't make the case for learning a "useful" language, it might as well be latin). I wholly agree that the understanding one gains bout the nature of language and communication from learning a foreign language is great (I wouldn't call it fundamental, but that's a difference of degree). But two (or even 4 or 6) years of a foreign language at the level it's taught in public schools isn't enough for most people to get to a sufficient level to illuminate those concepts. Ah, TW Gradgrind is an engineer, I take it? The time to teach languages to kids is long before you start thinking about 'bankable skills'. No, I was a liberal arts student, and lived abroad for awhile. I got first-hand experience in how unimportant my hard-won French/German/Russian skills are. The way to learn languages is immersion, and if parents want to send their kids to a bilingual school, I'm all for that (assuming that school isn't just a way for them to avoid learning one of the languages). My wife and I will raise our children to be at least bilingual (her native languages are Polish and German). But it's silly to expect that the public school system can generally provide the necessary level of immersion for everyone to learn a foreign language. Way better to focus on the basics.
Languages aren't taught to be bankable. There are a few things you can learn which are truly "bankable", in the sense that they have a direct correlation to making money: engineering, medicine, accounting, law, and finance/economics. Learning a language is part of the liberal arts. It's bankable in the same way that English and History are bankable: not something directly correlated with making money, but things that not knowing becomes a sign of ignorance. I think on an elite level, among people who might actually have a chance to use it, we can create a better foreign language education infrastructure. The human brain is built for learning languages, and communities which have the economic means and geographic access to make more intensive foreign language learning practical should do so.
People who can negotiate a deal in another language, or attend a professional conference that deals with a technical subject, definitely have a bankable skill. Some of the foundations for this will be the same as those you need if you want to study the literature of that language in a liberal arts setting, but at some point the courses diverge. And we don't have a lot of course of the bankable kind. Frankly, the non-elite in this country can't afford to spend many years on difficult-to-acquire skills just so that they look educated to outsiders. It's hard enough for most people to make the transition from adolescence to earning enough money to support a family. The solution, in my opinion, is to change how language study works so that it is actually useful and available to a wider range of people. Making it a class marker really does get you the snob label. Sorry.
M.C., I see what you're saying, but there's a certain baseline of language knowledge you need before you can start the instruction that makes it "bankable," and that involves the standard vocabularly, grammar, and ability to read a book that you describe as too "literature-based." I'm open to hearing about what alternative methods of language study are to make it more bankable, however. I've studied a few foreign languages, and the end point is always, "read these complicated books and essays and absorb the vocabulary," along with refining oral skills by immersion.
Change the books, and make the immersion setting more career-focused. Learn some math or science or law in the new language... lots of interesting vocabulary there. The occasional novel isn't bad either. The problem is when the end goal of studying the language is to become a scholar of literature and to go into teaching. There's a limited market for that, and enough competition to belie the notion that Americans won't study languages, so most people will (quite rationally) switch their educational investment to something more employable. I think it's mostly a problem of different educational pipelines. The question I'm posing is something along the lines of how you construct a system that produces engineers who are fluent in both English and Chinese to the extent that they can use both in their professional lives. There has to be something beyond learning Chinese on one side of campus and engineering on the other. A big chunk of the engineering curriculum would have to be in English for the Chinese speakers and in Chinese for the English speakers. Obviously, an American university is a lot more likely to offer the former than the latter. We have tons of foreign language immersion programs in this country, but they're almost all into English rather than from English into some other language!
Uhm, Tyro, actually midwestern states like Iowa, Minnesota or Wisconsin do very well as far as secondary education is concerned, while coastal California ranks near the bottom.
TW Andrews, as somebody who took five languages, I don't agree. Learning other languages made me a better writer, it improved my reading comprehension skills, and it helped me understand our language better. Learning other languages also improves intelligence and it helps in study skills, which is only helpful to other studies. Now, the way foreign languages are taught in public schools is something I disagree with.
Many foreign educational systems are good at teaching their students English, the world's dominant language. Our students already can speak English. Why waste their limited time on trying to teach them some language of declining importance when there is so much else they need to learn? By the way, by Obama's Indonesian teachers' accounts, he never learned much Indonesian despite years of immersion in it. Does he know any other languages? I've never heard that he does. So, how, exactly, has Obama's lack of fluency in a second or third language held him back in his chosen career? Would he now be the frontrunner for Galactic Overlord if he'd picked up Spanish and Klingnon?
People who can negotiate a deal in another language, or attend a professional conference that deals with a technical subject, definitely have a bankable skill. This is absolutely true. But this is quite a high level of proficiency, and realistically, one which can only going to be gained by immersion. No amount of comparative literature study is going to get you there without practical, day-to-day practice. I'm not against people taking foreign languages if that's what interests them, any more than I would discourage them from studying art history. Knowledge for it's own sake is a wonderful thing. However, I think that the time spent teaching foreign languages in public schools largely wasted. TW Andrews, as somebody who took five languages, I don't agree. Learning other languages made me a better writer, it improved my reading comprehension skills, and it helped me understand our language better. I'm not saying there's no benefit, only that for most people, the benefit of a few years of public school language instruction is very small, and that time is better spent on other things which are under-taught already. The main problem with our public schools isn't that they aren't generating enough French speakers.
I think that the time spent teaching foreign languages in public schools [is] largely wasted This I don't agree with. I was better prepared to study foreign languages I had more time and interest to study when I was in college because I had studied a foreign language in high school that I now only rarely use. Certainly they could be taught better, so the time isn't wasted as much, but you could take most any class beyond arithmetic and english composition and claim that the time spent teaching it was wasted. When was the last time I needed to know about Hoover's Reconstruction Finance Corporation?
@ TW Andrews Almost all European high-school students have to learn a foreign language for 5 to 9 years - it' compulsory and they seem to be able to handle the remaining work-load just fine. Also, quite a few of those students go abroad for an exchange year when they're sixteen, i.e. after 6 years of foreign language education and most of them have no problem at all with successfully completing a year of high-school in a foreign language.
Almost all European high-school students have to learn a foreign language for 5 to 9 years - it' compulsory and they seem to be able to handle the remaining work-load just fine. Foreign language instruction is just heads and shoulders better in Europe than America, and Europeans have many more day-to-day opportunities to practice their skills than most Americans. Even so, a great many Europeans outside major cities don't speak English that well (the French are particularly abominable in this regard). I taught English in France for a year, and worked for nearly 5 in Switzerland, and the people who spoke English well were those who had either lived in an English speaking country for six+ months, or took every opportunity they could to see English language films and shows and to speak with English-speaking ex-pats. The exceptions to this are Scandinavians where American and English television programs are sub-titled rather than dubbed. Scandies speak amazing English, almost without regard to how much they've studied it. I was better prepared to study foreign languages I had more time and interest to study when I was in college because I had studied a foreign language in high school that I now only rarely use But other than this being of personal interest to you, doesn't being better prepared to study something that you only rarely use seem like a waste? Studying subjects of personal interest is great, but I don't see the value in making it part of the core curriculum for people who aren't personally interested. Though your point about the way history is taught certainly rings true. Anyway, I think it's great that people who want to study foreign languages have the opportunity to do so, and I'd certainly encourage them in their studies. But as a practical matter, for an English speaker to gain basic proficiency in a foreign language isn't particularly useful. Gaining fluency or mastery is obviously a different question, but that requires a different order of dedication, and isn't something that non-immersive public schools are equipped to facilitate.
But as a practical matter, for an English speaker to gain basic proficiency in a foreign language isn't particularly useful. Then you might as well scrap history, literature, art, music, biology, chemistry etc. - none of these subjects are particularly 'useful' for the vast majority of people in later life.
I don't see the value in making it part of the core curriculum for people who aren't personally interested. You claimed to have studied the liberal arts? Also, maybe I wasn't clear on what I was trying to explain: in high school, I studied a foreign language that I now only rarely use. LATER, I studied a foreign language that I use a lot more often. Without the foundational knowledge of a foreign language that I had at a young(er) age (but don't use much now), I would have been less able to take up the study of a foreign language when I was older. Though one point you did make which bears repeating: the degree to which many middle-class foreigners speak English is greatly exaggerated. In Amsterdam, pretty much everyone speaks English-- they have to, since hardly anyone can be expected to know Dutch. But you can get along in life pretty well living in France or Germany only knowing your own country's language, and plenty of them are perfectly happy with that.
Does he know any other languages? I've never heard that he does. Well, that settles it. It's not as if any American politician seeking national office as a Democrat would dare make such things public before the votes are counted. The exceptions to this are Scandinavians where American and English television programs are sub-titled rather than dubbed. Also, the Dutch, a nation that realised no-one was going to learn Dutch back in 1650 or thereabouts. (It's fun being part of conversations that switch between Dutch, English and German, even if that means only the Dutch participants know exactly what's being said.) Ultimately, we all study for things that turn out not to be 'bankable', but play an important part in shaping our capacities. I haven't solved a differential equation in fifteen years, but I'm glad I devoted the time and effort on it. As for language teaching, if it's possible to imbue basic skills at age six or seven, then that makes space for those with . But I'll say this -- at fourteen or fifteen, you're in the perfect position to skip the language classes that at eighteen or nineteen you regret not taking seriously.
I read an article about teaching children foreign languages that maded the following point: teach young children (maybe ages 3-7) how to say and understand a few key phrases in multiple languages, and teach them this until they master it. The goal is to train young children's ear and brains to understand and recognize the basic sounds and structure of various languages and internalize them. Again, it's only necessary to teach a few phrases to achieve this goal. Then, when they're older (teens or adults), they can actually study any one of the given languages in more depth and have a better chance of learning that language successfully.
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Posted by David | July 9, 2008 11:45 AM