Verbal Vigor

Student interest, at Harvard, often determines the educational bill-of-fare. But if the Faculty responded to student apathy in elementary languages, required German, French, or Spanish courses would long have gone the way of compulsory Rhetoric, Logic, and Semantics. Yet the language requirements remain to blight the freshman year, because the Faculty rates highly the value of language well-taught--although the College has consistently failed to take steps to bring good language teaching to Harvard. The apathy of student and teacher alike spoils the value of the courses. Since the course seem sure to remain, the apathy deserves attention.

Most of the disillusion springs from the teachers themselves--for elementary languages are particularly difficult for research scholars to teach, particularly when many of their students have developed in high school a remarkable immunity toward learning language. At Harvard, research men are continually meeting the new and challenging ideas of their fields, equipping them to inspire their General Education students with provocative ideas.

Yet until grammar becomes a matter of opinion, and vocabulary an artistic style, "amo, amas, amat" must rule the language classroom. Sermons will not change instructors' attitudes toward verb declensions. To enliven and modernize the language teaching, the Faculty must recognize the inherent difference between instruction in language, and teaching in the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.

New Teaching Team

To find the teachers whose interests and skills coincide with elementary language courses, the University must go outside the ranks of graduate students. Using the most effective and enthusiastic high school language teachers as a standard, the College should hire permanent language instructors, who would teach the beginning and intermediate sections of German, French and Spanish. Graduate students and regular research men could continue to teach the literary courses at the upper levels, where their special interests and insights would continue to lend color to their teaching.

By hiring permanent language instructors the University would necessarily deviate from its policy of hiring graduate students, wherever possible, to teach the undergraduate sections. This policy, designed to give the students interested instructors and the graduate students teaching practice, has failed only in the area of elementary languages. Its abandonment there need not disturb its successful operation in other fields.

The selection of skilled permanent instructors for elementary languages would make other innovations more valuable. Language laboratories, for example, are in use at many state universities. While they are be no means universally effective, they might operate on a voluntary basis for students who learn language more easily when they hear themselves pronounce it.

Skilled teachers could make the distinctions between introductory, refresher, and intermediate language courses more useful. By carefully choosing students for the refresher courses--designed especially for students who did not respond to their high school language instruction--the efficiency of teaching in all the language courses would improve.

The mediocre instruction in many of Harvard's language sections wastes time and money together. A larger investment in languages would not "throw good money after bad." Instead, extra money could give Harvard excellent language instruction, which is the only justification for any required language instruction at all.