Friday, July 20, 2007 | Opinion
SP 07/22/07 LEFT/RIGHT: Beyond crepes and victims

Beyond crepes and victims
By Bob Zaslavsky

In its latest draft of course criteria, which will go into effect July 1, 2008, the Georgia Department of Education’s foreign language recommendation is not, strictly speaking, a requirement and it is both inadequate and demeaning. Continuing our discussion from last week, anything less than three years (a two-year basic course followed by one year of literature study) is less than what a student needs to achieve genuine mastery of another language. The goal of studying another language—just as with English—is the understanding of another culture, and no understanding of a culture can develop without a feel for that culture’s literature.

Too many students today treat teachers with contempt, and the system supports them in that treatment.

Beyond crepes and victims
By Bob Zaslavsky

In its latest draft of course criteria, which will go into effect July 1, 2008, the Georgia Department of Education’s foreign language recommendation is not, strictly speaking, a requirement and it is both inadequate and demeaning. Continuing our discussion from last week, anything less than three years (a two-year basic course followed by one year of literature study) is less than what a student needs to achieve genuine mastery of another language. The goal of studying another language—just as with English—is the understanding of another culture, and no understanding of a culture can develop without a feel for that culture’s literature.

In Spanish, students should advance to the work of Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Pablo Neruda and Carlos Fuentes, not stop with knowing how to cook a quesadilla. In French, they should advance to Rabelais, Moliere, Racine and Camus, not stop with knowing how to prepare crepes. In Latin, Italian, German, or Japanese, they should advance to Virgil, Dante, Goethe or “The Tale of Genji,” not stop with knowing how to ask where the bathroom is.

In addition, non-native speakers of any language should not be exempt from the requirements on the basis of an alleged conversational fluency in their native language. Instead, they should be required to take an appropriate third-year literature course, and only if they successfully complete an examination that demonstrates a mastery of their native language equal to that provided here in a good, basic two-year course.

Furthermore, to consider American Sign Language (ASL) a foreign language is bizarre. ASL is English—period.

The enormous latitude in the choice of electives allowing for up to 14 one-semester courses must also be addressed. Since our students are impoverished when it comes to the fundamentals of a good education, it would be worthwhile to peel off one year of electives to increase the social studies requirement to four years, and another year to introduce a geography requirement. That still would leave five years of electives.

The very term “elective” has become muddled. In its origin, an elective was a non-required, freely chosen supplemental course. Precisely because an elective was assumed to be chosen out of independent, personal motivation to learn, in my youth electives were expected to be—and were—more demanding and more rigorous than required courses that, by their nature, were filled with “captive audiences.”

Sadly, over the past half century, the term “elective” often has become code for a non-demanding indulgence in a hobby-like pastime, a time- and space-filler not to be taken seriously. When I was in high school and college, electives were our honors and advanced placement courses rolled into one and were far more challenging than their contemporary equivalents.

The other problem with the new draft is this: It allows those with “significant cognitive disability” to avoid foreign language courses. Allowing this exception will simply fill the bank accounts of psychologists willing to name a syndrome (with appropriate acronym) at the drop of a hat. Such exceptions run rampant would become an impediment to strengthening our system.

Our teachers may have weaknesses, but they can be forgiven some of those weaknesses when one considers the extent to which, in our system, in any disagreement between teacher and student, all too frequently the teacher is “guilty until proven innocent,” while the student is innocent even if proven guilty. Too many students today treat teachers with contempt, and the system supports them in that treatment.

As hard as it is for many persons today to believe, there was a time when students respected their most knowledgeable teachers—charismatic or not—and at least gave deference to the rest. We have evolved a system in which everyone—in one way or another—has been victimized.

In such a system, students too often—and all unknowingly—have chosen as their behavioral exemplars Stepin Fetchit or the Frito Bandito or Charlie Chan’s “Number Two son” instead of W.E.B. DuBois or Jorge Luis Borges or Confucius.

In such a system, teachers—ill-equipped as they may be—have chosen to refrain from doing something meaningful out of a fear that they will be blamed for doing anything that students will find uncomfortable.

The new requirements are too little, too late, and unless the entire culture of teaching and studenting is renovated, even that little is doomed to failure. SP

Bob Zaslavsky is a retired teacher of our much-neglected humanities.