Why You Need a Foreign Language & How to Learn One

Chapter 8 (Excerpt)

foreign languages, patriotism, and American Values

"To know your enemy, you must become your enemy...Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." –Sun Tzu, The Art of War

To celebrate Foreign Language Week in 2005, Maryland's Old Mill High School broadcast the Pledge of Allegiance in a variety of languages, including Spanish, Latin, French, and Russian. The English-language version of the Pledge was also broadcast for the student body. One fifteen-year-old student protested the Foreign Language Week observance, and refused to stand for the pledge. When asked to explain himself, the ninth-grader said:

"This is America, and we've got soldiers at war. When you're saying the Pledge in a different language which nobody understands, that's not OK."

            The boy's father supported his son's protest, and compared the reading of the Pledge of Allegiance in a foreign language to "wearing a cross upside down in a church."

Now let's examine a far more serious story that made the news about three years before the Maryland teen staged his protest. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, it was revealed that our national security apparatus suffered from a lack of FBI agents and CIA operatives who speak Arabic, Farsi, and Pashtu. On June 7th, 2002, ABC News even reported that U.S. government officials were unable to complete a timely translation of "at least one conversation in Arabic before the Sept. 11 attacks in which the participants spoke about something big that was going to happen on that day... "  By the time the relevant materials were translated, the attacks had already occurred. (Source: ABCNEWS.com, 06/07/02)

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu suggested that we should know our opponents even more intimately than we know our allies. In this light, learning other languages and cultures provides strategic advantages. However, as long as the study of language is a one-sided endeavor, the advantages of bilingualism will only function for our commercial and strategic rivals.

Like other nationalities, Americans have often felt an urge to expel the language of the enemy. During the First World War, German language schools in my native Cincinnati were shut down. Throughout the more recent Cold War, Russian Studies professors were frequently the target of McCarthyist persecutions. To learn the language of the enemy is often seen as a sign of surrender. Hypothetical defeats are often alluded to in linguistic terms: "If the war had been lost, we would all be speaking German/Russian/etc."...................... 

(End of Chapter Excerpt)

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