For decades beginning when I was in junior high, for God’s sake, which was more than 25 years ago, lots of business gurus and education pundits warned ferociously that American students must learn foreign languages in order to be ready for a more global economy—that such a multi-lingual marketplace was inevitable.
My own rural middle Georgia high school offered French, which many of us would need as we ordered le poule avec gras at the Kentucky Fried Chicken. We stumbled through the Maison D’Etre (the “House of To-Be”) breaking grammatical rules like lamps as we went, earned passing grades and went on to college to focus on things that were more practical, like business management. Of course, we couldn’t have known then that our mono-lingualism would doom the American economy 25 years later. In fact, while news magazines ran interviews with business people pleading for students to learn foreign languages only when no other news was available, our parents were telling us that everyone in the world who was anyone spoke English.
This self-sabotaging way of thinking has continued until today when a debate about making English our official language rages in state houses across the nation as stupidly as a dangerously fat man arguing for more donuts. It’s the immigration issue that has spurred politicians and xenophobes and outright racists to take this defensive stance regarding English, not their love of the English language itself which their press releases make clear they neither respect or value. English is, and should be, our primary language for law, education and business in this country, but the focus of everyone with a tongue should be on learning a foreign language. English, despite its disproportionately large contribution to the world’s best literature, cannot save us now.
As Slate’s Daniel Gross puts it so incisively in his piece, “The Rise of American Incompetence,” on March 15, “Doubtful of the ability of provincial American executives, with their limited language skills, to negotiate today's global business environment, the boards of massive U.S. firms like Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Alcoa, and insurer AIG have hired foreign-born CEOs.”
There is, of course, more that has led us down this path—most tellingly, as Gross explains, our business leaders’ demonstrated lack of ability to manage, period. And I put that down to the simple fact that there is absolutely no reason for America’s CEOs to be good at their jobs. Having earned an MBA at one of the approved business schools, they are anointed. Their boards, worried that they might include embarrassing bits about them in a tell-all book, will award them golden parachutes no matter how poorly they perform. Caught with their hands in the employee pension funds, they cry like babies if their farewell packages are reduced from $14 million to $9 million, more money than anyone can spend in practical ways in a lifetime, because to them their salaries are emblems of prestige. They stack themselves up on bizarre scales to measure against other CEOs: “If he’s worth $14 million, then I should be worth $16 million,” while the businesses they run slog along shedding jobs, and whole industries relocate to other countries.
So, my young Americans, do me a favor. Learn to speak a foreign language and grow up to run the kind of businesses your American great-grandparents would have been proud of, the kind that employs a lot of Americans, that pays them decent wages, the kind of wages that allow them to buy good homes and put some money away for buying that little cabin on the lake when they retire; the kind of business that will not leave its employees in the lurch but will stand by them through thick and thin. In other words, restore the glory of the great American economic engine, the same one that has been dismantled by greed and laziness, a combination that in an earlier time would have been called “avarice.” Avarice is one of the seven deadly sins, and now I think Americans know why.