Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Saturday, July 12, 2008
There is nothing wrong with foreign language instruction
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama suggested that American students should study Spanish. From the outcry, one might have thought he was advocating the overthrow of our government.
Bobby Earle, who writes a column on a Republican Web site, had this to say: “Our education system is crazy enough with all these liberal feel-good programs. Forget adding, subtracting, spelling and grammar. Now, despite the fact that the rest of the world is learning English, he says that American kids should learn Spanish? What? Learn Spanish? Yes, and it shows just how out of touch and far left Obama is. We need a president who will put America first, not push for our culture to be forgotten.”
Say what? That’s one of the most stupid comments we’ve heard in years. American schools have been teaching foreign languages for decades. One of those foreign languages is Spanish, which is used by a significant number of people who live in the Western Hemisphere, with us.
We weren’t aware that learning other languages made someone a left-leaning person who wanted to push for our culture to be forgotten. Actually, part of our culture is having immigrants come here and build new lives — including people from Spanish-speaking countries.
For the record, here’s what Obama actually said.
Speaking to supporters in Powder Springs, Ga., Obama criticized attempts to have an English-only policy for the United States.
Then he said: “I agree that immigrants should learn English ... But understand this, instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how your child can become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language. It’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is merci beaucoup, right?”
American teachers of foreign languages have been urging young people to learn other languages for years. It doesn’t mean they want students to be anti-American, or forget their culture. It just means that they want young Americans to be fluent in other languages, as young people from other parts of the world are comfortable in other languages.
It’s surprising — and a little depressing — that the idea of foreign language instruction should be so shocking to some people.
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