From dlupher@ups.edu Mon Mar 12 10:05:40 2001 Received: from mxu1.u.washington.edu (mxu1.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.11.2+UW01.01/8.11.2+UW01.02) with ESMTP id f2CI5dL24690 for ; Mon, 12 Mar 2001 10:05:39 -0800 Received: from mail.ups.edu (main.ups.edu [192.124.98.219]) by mxu1.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id KAA05430 for ; Mon, 12 Mar 2001 10:05:38 -0800 Received: from [207.207.116.53] (wyatt1dhcp53.ups.edu [207.207.116.53]) by mail.ups.edu (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id f2CI5ZZ07136 for ; Mon, 12 Mar 2001 10:05:35 -0800 (PST) X-Sender: dlupher@mail.ups.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <3AAC780C.90EF0763@caratzas.com> References: <000c01c0aa78$d97b2e60$b4cb64a8@jfgannon> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/enriched; charset="us-ascii" Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 09:53:59 -0800 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: No foreign languages in Iowa! "J.P.E.P." wrote: Writing in 1910 to support the teaching of Latin, Classicist Paul Shorey wrote: "After Greek, Latin, and after Latin, all literary, historical, and philological study of French and German. Convert your departments into Berlitz schools of languages. It is that which you are educating the public to demand, and that is all your students will be capable of" Quoted in Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, By Diane Ravitch About a year ago my sister-in-law was fuming because her children's Catholic school had decided to contract out foreign language teaching (Spanish, the school no longer teaches Latin) to . . .Berlitz. I wonder if Mr. Shorey had visions too. The "Berlitz" analogy was in fact grimly invoked by one of the German profs whose necks are on the Drake chopping block. I should have mentioned that one theme of the CHE article on the Drake decision is the contrast between Pres. Maxwell's strictly utilitarian approach to language study and what one might call a "liberal arts" view of foreign language learning. Here's David Maxwell in his own words: I admit that our whole approach is very pragmatic. Will students have the same nuanced undestanding of German culture as they would if they'd had three years of reading Goethe, Rilke, and Mann in the original? Of course not. But I'll also say---only somewhat facetiously---that they will be able to speak German. He means, of course, that they will be "able to speak German" after a semester or year abroad---presumably in a program strictly for beginners, since Drake students won't be able to take German at Drake, and even if they take it in high school, it will be pretty rusty by the time (traditionally junior year) they're ready for that semester or year abroad. Maxwell seems to be operating on the assumption that a college German course *either* 1) enables you to read Goethe in the original *or* 2) enables you to speak German. Why he assumes that it can't do both eludes me. I suppose it all goes back to an epiphanic moment he had as he was struggling up dormitory stairs in Russia carrying two large suitcases. He had studied Russian for years and (so claims the CHE version of his anecdote) had read the whole of "War and Peace" in the original, but when a man shouted a short sentence behind him three times before Maxwell realized that he was saying "Do you need help?" he realized that foreign language study in a U.S. college is worthless. And so a revolutionary educational idea was born. David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .