This first issue of Praesidium’s third year (at least, its third year as Praesidium: some of you recall the journal’s earlier incarnation as Arcturus) was quickly determined by three factors. The first was my own burning desire to write more about the teaching of foreign language—particularly, this time, as we find it prosecuted in our elementary schools. Needless to say, I spend a great deal of my space talking about Spanish, which is increasingly the only nag running in the Elementary Sweepstakes. The central issues, however, have a much broader scope. They concern not just which second language we learn, if any, and not just what kind of education our children receive (if any), but what role we in the West foresee clear thought playing in the race after the hearts of buyers and voters. If any.

The second factor was J.S. Moseby’s decision to begin writing a novel, one chapter of which he originally offered to me for this issue. Since the inauguration of Praesidium, I have been consistently puzzled by the difficulty of extracting fiction from creative writers. I find it hard to believe that all of them expect payment today when, thirty years ago, we no-names were happy just to get into print somewhere. The truth, I’m beginning to suspect, is that serious fiction simply isn’t written any more. (I decline to view multicultural propaganda and cartoon-like science fiction as serious.) In my ever more quixotic quest, then, to insert a little fiction into every issue, I have found myself deeply beholden to a few writers, one of whom is certainly Mr. Moseby. As our deadline approached and it appeared probable that we would have a lot of free space, I asked for a second chapter of this novel in progress, and it was graciously volunteered. Not long after that (as luck would have it), I was offered an excellent essay on realism and given a proposal for another essay on romantic fantasy, either one of which would have filled up our open space nicely… but I was already committed to the two chapters. I have every intention of publishing both of said essays in the spring issue. Meanwhile, I hope you like Footprints in the Snow of the Moon as much as I do, because it accounts for a third of what you have before you!

Which isn’t at all a bad thing in principle—devoting a large space to fiction, I mean. Would that we might do so more often! Sometimes I fear Praesidium’s becoming so profoundly philosophical that we give the impression of holding creativity in low esteem. On the contrary. All of our contributors over the years have been men and women who love literature, and impressively many of them have also referred to music and other of the fine arts in their articles. Why, one of the things that distresses me most about how we teach Spanish is that we provide no very effective gateway to reading Hispanic authors: we only prepare our children to gab with waiters or charm foreign investors. The third major evolutionary factor behind this issue, then, was a vague feeling of mine that it was time for us to "loosen up" a bit—not to be less profound, but to run our study over some of our landscape’s colorful cottages and hamlets rather than counting quasars. Legend has it that the Greek philosopher Thales broke his neck stumbling into a hole one night while gazing at the stars. The lesson is well worth attending: not just both feet on the ground, but an eye on the road.

I didn’t simply pull this third objective out of my hat and then approach people about helping me fulfill it. I was, rather, very lucky: people started sending me reviews of books and films before my idea had really crystallized. One of the book reviews—that of Peter Sacks’s Generation X Goes to College—was actually a collaborative effort (one person started it and another had to finish it). In such cases, I have always simply appended the label "staff" to the item, though we really don’t have a staff in any of the word’s recognized senses. I might add that we also abuse the same word quite often in cases where the writer offers a short, perhaps slightly caustic piece (but when have we ever been caustic?) and prefers not to be identified.

Otherwise, some of our most faithful supporters have chipped in, including Professor Bertonneau, Mary Grabar, Kelly Hampton, and Peter Singleton. It’s a pleasure to be able to offer so much variety, and produced by such fine writers. Note well, by the way, that we turn away neither the very short nor the very long: we attend only to content.

Finally, I ask formally that anyone contact me who knows of a genuinely bibliophile bookstore which might care to risk a small part of a shelf on Praesidium. One of my firmer resolutions this year is to attempt wooing a few such places with copies of our journal. If you have a favorite fearless bookstore on the corner and happen to mention us to the sympathetic person behind the counter, please remember that the quarterly is a non-profit venture—which means, practically, that the owner gets to pocket whatever he or she charges. All that we might ask would be an occasional small contribution to help defray production and postage costs.

Winter continues mild in these parts. May your spring bring you a bluebird or—if city-bound—a cherry blossom!

~JH

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In an earlier issue of this journal, I published some thoughts about the teaching of foreign language in the United States, mostly as practiced at colleges and universities.1  I expressed the opinion then that although foreign language departments seem one of the few pockets of the liberal arts likely to withstand the vast decline of literate habits, the sad realities of the classroom belie the discipline’s promise. Specifically, I noted an ominous shift in instructional strategy favoring verbal fluency over literate competence. When the shift began, the Free World (as we then called it) was fighting for its survival, and North America had recognized its prevalent mono-lingualism as a severe handicap in waging the Cold War. There are no more such vital concerns driving the pedagogical vector now. On the contrary, in times of peace and plenty, we simply neglected our literate heritage until, today, only the college student majoring in foreign language ever reads one or two very short novels or writes as much as a paragraph.

This disparagement of literacy has thoroughly percolated through the system. In the present addendum to my earlier comments, I wish to trace its effects upon the elementary school curriculum—up from which the toxic percolating has proceeded, I am told. Here my own son and his classmates are struggling before my eyes, as it were, to clutch linguistic substance through a miasma of merry conversational chatter. My testimony as a parent (admittedly anecdotal) and as an educator at many levels (somewhat more objective) must constitute my body of evidence, for an essay is not the proper forum to conduct an exhaustive survey of textbooks. If I may ballast my case from the start by appealing to common sense, I would invite anyone to search the Internet for information about foreign language instruction. The material thus dredged up will be heavily redolent of progressive new teaching aids (videos, tapes, software, CDs) and reviews of said aids. Since the essence of technology is to draw the student away from the "boring" printed page of the "stodgy" classic and into a world of fireworks-at-the-fingertips, no bright observer would need much convincing beyond this point that literature and literacy are in deep trouble.

Of course, one may be more objective still without claiming to be exhaustive. The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, for instance, publishes a newsletter (partially accessible online) which gives one a sense of how professionals view the trends. My own sense, as primed by such perusal, is that foreign language teachers recognize two great crises afoot: viz., students are getting bored, and the old literary establishment—people like me—has not yet been annihilated. Actually, the lower levels seem confident that they have solved the boredom crisis. My essay is devoted to assessing their "triumph". At the upper levels, college professors appear less concerned that high school whiz kids cannot place out of French 101 than that placement tests are so rigorous. To them, the problem is not the freshman’s lack of basic grammatical knowledge, but a testing system which bestows a premium upon that knowledge. Recent "studies" (predictably enough) urge an inversion of priorities, based largely upon student interest (i.e., degree of fun). An enthusiastic adherent to one such report anticipates an indignant query from some atavistic grump about grammar’s disappearance, and offers the following response:

In their answer to this question, the authors [of the report] stress their efforts to change the emphasis from memorization of words and grammar rules to the exploration, development and use of "communicative strategies, learning strategies and critical thinking skills as well as the appropriate elements of the language system and culture"…. The document is intended as a corrective to past practices, where teachers were tied hand and foot to the grammar book. The authors seek to set them and their students free.2

These days, when you see the word "strategy" or the equative "as well as" used to attach the last member of a list, duck: a large ball of educationese is careering your way. "Document" is almost as ominous, while "set free" is a positive siren, warning that whatever has devoured your hook is likely to pull you into the deep blue sea. With such mushy jargon oozing from them at the slightest prod, no wonder the educators who write our children’s textbooks hold precise communication in low esteem! One can well imagine that they neither have much affection for order nor comprehend how to keep young students (who hate disorder) from rebelling. Over and over in my cursory reading, I remarked the terror inspired in these visionaries by the bored child—and the complementary delight stirred in them by entertaining "strategies". Every other consideration seemed to take a back seat. The college brain trust, particularly, saw enrollments shrinking and departments shriveling up if the ivory tower should fail to fall in behind the crayon-and-kazoo brigade.

How ironic it is, then, to hear one’s son of seven years denouncing such entertaining methods as tedious because they obscure basic grammatical relationships to his young mind! The truth is that chasing after a child’s whimsy is like trying to build a road to a moving target, whereas proceeding straight to a highly visible destination invites a few songs and games along the way. How did foreign language teachers come to adopt the flashy pedagogy of constant casual chatter which yields so many mixed results and downright absurdities? Was it simply a gambit to keep little children engrossed in their classes? Can it ever have been that at the lower levels, where every child I question registers frustration over the absence of rules and guidelines?

A great many studies—and, before them, the cogent testimony of practical experience and common sense—argue that human beings learn languages other than their mother tongue more readily while still on their mother’s knee. At an early age, it seems, you can get two mother tongues for the price of one. Of course, a certain amount of confusion results. The toddler is likely to lisp his own patois bred of the two languages he hears daily. There is plenty of time to sort this all out, however: building grammatical and dictional fences between the two gardens as they flourish is immensely easier than breaking ground for a new garden as another luxuriates within well-manicured boundaries. Let us, therefore, teach our children to say "pass the salt, please" in two tongues rather than one.

So goeth the case. The palpable consequence of such reasoning is the muscle-flexing dominance among today’s textbooks and pedagogical tactics of "real life" Spanish or French over charts, tables, and paradigms. Since children learn to speak before they read, and since few "real life" encounters these days involve any reading whatever (how many of us still characterize reading as either "real" or "an encounter"?), the officially blessed variety of immersion is conversational. Its vocabulary is trite and lackluster, its grammar is idiomatic to the verge of slang, and its context may be classed as leisurely/commercial—the ball game, the lunch room, the movie theater, the birthday party, the grocery store. Wherever we learned to jabber English before we learned to read it (if we ever truly did), there we are transported by the contemporary foreign language textbook. Life between these two covers is a festive array of piñatas, bananas, avocados, and sopapillas. It is colorful, yummy, sensuous. It requires no pondering or dissecting. I came, I saw, I tasted.

But my comments here impinge upon moral judgment: if I am not cautious, my next remark might indict the unworthiness and stupidity of the shallow life. Such a criticism would not be entirely fair as a challenge to foreign-language pedagogy, for it more accurately attaches to all celebration of idle chatter over deliberate writing—and our whole culture, of course, is becoming a "chatter" culture. Let me confine myself, therefore, to addressing this "real life immersion" pedagogy strictly as a means of learning another language. In my opinion, even its shallowest depths are quite sufficiently corrupted by shoals to render them unnavigable.

Point One: Total immersion in another language is a practical impossibility for most children. The youngsters who grow up speaking English and German or French and English at the same time live in bilingual households. The school teacher has control over about half of their waking hours—and in how many cases is this teacher also bilingual? One would hope, indeed, that math, science, music, and art lessons (not to mention English class) would be carried on in one language only: twice the linguistic presentation would mean half the math, science, art, and music. Foreign language textbooks tacitly acknowledge the futility of their own method precisely by being conversational rather than offering paradigms and logical explanations. That is, they undertake to supply the casual exchanges in the second language which the student would otherwise never have. But if the student is only "immersed" in casual chatter during one thirty- or forty-minute period of a very full day, then the immersion is scarcely so much as a kindergartner’s hand-washing. For most students, the kind of exposure needed to imbibe a second language from the routine of living could not possibly be achieved, even if such acquisition were truly the most thorough and reliable sort. Fortunately, this isn’t at all so, for the reasons that follow.

Point Two: Conversational language is often improper: its "lessons" must be unlearned later, and it has indeed no reliable instructive value even in teaching good phonetic habits. To my dying day, I shall remember how the chairman of my dissertation committee, Douglass Parker, confronted me with my misspelling of the word "helmet". A gentle man whose sense of irony was tireless, Dr. Parker was very hard put to find a way of saying, "You’re a doctoral candidate, and you don’t know how to spell helmet?" I believe his discomfort upset me far more than my own—was largely the cause of my own, no doubt. He was looking for a way to laugh something off which didn’t particularly move him to mirth.

Of course, it took him no time at all to diagnose the problem correctly: my Texas upbringing. I spelled the word as I had always heard it pronounced: helmit (rhyming with hermit). If I wanted to chafe against life’s little injustices, now would be my cue to indict a system which rates some people over others just because of where they’re born. Northeasterners who are not a whit smarter than the rest of us spell properly without effort (and probably interview far better for cerebral white-collar positions) merely because they were brought up to mangle the language less than those of us south of the Mason-Dixon Line and west of the Mississippi. To be forever paddling against the currents of childhood and environment in pursuit of correctness is the ultimate raw deal… or would be, but for one thing. A good teacher (the grade-school equivalent of a Douglass Parker) can considerably reduce the current’s drag, and surely children in the world’s wealthiest nation have a right to expect one or two such teachers somewhere along the way. The ultimate raw deal, then, is not to be born into a sub-culture of defective linguistic habits, but to be aided and abetted in sustaining such habits by those entrusted with setting one straight.

Conversational speech is a veritable treasure trove of aberrant habits. When we speak informally, we contract, coin, and maim without suffering any chastisement whatever. Indeed, the unintelligibility which would cost us a chance at a good job writing handbooks or press releases may be the tie that binds among tight cliques of cronies. In a setting where people are heard to deliver themselves of utterances like, "Car’s bad loose on them hairpins," knowledge of exactly how to abuse the language can mean the difference between penetrating the inner circle and being waved back among the mass of outsiders. In other words, slang is élitist. It raises walls. Academic liberalism would have us believe (with the insufferably haughty histrionics of "going slumming") that, on the contrary, the observance of grammatical rules and standard diction is a ploy of the educated to keep the masses down—but this only happens when the educational system fails. The self-evident objective of rules and standards is instead to create a game where all can play. By basing foreign language instruction upon the parlance of the parking lot, the contemporary teacher ensures that students will be drifting away from the center’s "universalist" gravity, if not directly approaching the arcane gibberish of some certain fringe population. The student will be learning the language as it is used among those of its native speakers who have poorly learned it, or (at best) as its learned use it in their most careless moments.

I cannot think of a more succinct way to express the imbecility of this operation. For those who protest, "Yes, but my Mexican friends don’t understand the Castellano Spanish I learned in college," I would counter that a Chilean or a Dominican would probably understand these friends no better than they would understand a Spaniard. At least learning a fairly mainstream variety of Spanish gives you some chance of being understood tolerably by all groups. The main road leads to the possibility of reaching innumerable villages (and if some Mexican villagers need a new bridge to the Camino Reál, perhaps they should go back to school and study Spanish). A goat track to this or that village can only take you to this or that village. Again I ask the reader to ponder which of these two alternatives is more genuinely élitist.

Point Three: Typical conversation, thanks to its high density of irregular verbs, is actually the worst place to go looking for grammatical principles in action: to expect a child to induce such principles from such practice is outrageous. This point is quite distinct from the previous one, just as irregular but standard structures are distinct from slang. Strictly on the basis of logic, "he had went" is more defensible than "he had gone", yet it is sub-standard beyond any hope of reprieve. The logic of English has the preterite form and the past participle both emerging from the addition of –ed to the verbal stem: "he combed, he has combed". The formulations, "he went, he had went", would adhere to this pattern (or, better yet, "he goed, he had goed"). Over a period of centuries, however, certain odd preterites and past participles have become standard for certain verbs—probably, to be sure, because of the same forces which shape slang. People get careless, and the more times they use a word, the more likely they are to treat it carelessly. Familiarity breeds contempt. Irregular verbs are almost always those which have received the most frequent, most careless workouts. Words like get, take, do, see, go, and (of course) be are irregular in every language of which I have any special knowledge. The wind of human conversation has worn them into peculiar structures just as the winds of the high plains wear down rock into grotesque sculpture. Call this slang’s revenge, if you will: an irregular verb is an array of abuses which have become canonical.

We are stuck with each language’s Monument Valley of oddball structures. If we don’t learn them, we can’t communicate at the most superficial level; for, once again, these structures are almost always oddball precisely because they are on everyone’s lips all the time. They riddle the ordinary conversation of the ordinary person (even though not always in the irregularly standard form).3  In fact, I would guess that irregular verbs (if we include all appearances of "to be" in its many twisted guises) account for at least half the verbs used in any informal exchange. There have been no studies on the subject, as far as I know—but I would guess further that this same figure is well below twenty-five percent in most deliberate literature (i.e., writing which has been thought through carefully rather than rushed into print… i.e., writing as it used to be done). For instance, the casual remark, "I don’t see how he can take another hit like that," contains four verbs, every one of which is irregular! The same statement, written down with a teacher or attorney peering over one’s shoulder, might become, "I do not believe that he could have absorbed another shock of that kind." Only the auxiliary verbs remain troublesome. Just as conversation carries a much higher density of slang and slovenly error than literature, so it has a higher density of irregular verbs than literature. That thesis, subjective though its quantification may be, seems irrefutable to me on the basis of mere common sense. If you prefer, conduct your own experiments.

To return to our miserable youngster trying to learn Spanish or French from the contemporary textbook, its pages purged of conventional paradigms and filled endlessly with dialogues… this child has been posed a Herculean task. Under a steady bombardment of soy, estoy, voy, and doy (with he tossed in just to keep the brew completely muddied), he is to infer, over some untold number of years, that the standard ending for the Spanish verb in the first-person singular of the present tense is –o. I foresee three very likely "outcomes" (to talk the bureaucratic talk): he ends up believing immovably that the way to say "I speak Spanish" is Habloy español; he ends up believing with equal conviction that the way to say "I’m going to the store" is Vo a la bodega; or, most likely of all, he ends up not wanting to say anything, because he believes with some justification that he understands nothing.4

Point Four: English is almost unique among languages in its rigidly linear structure, causing English monolinguals frequently to underestimate the importance and difficulty of learning inflections in other tongues. Most studies of early multilingualism involve children in English-speaking households where a French spouse or a Spanish nanny introduces another tongue.5  English is a very special language in these relationships: its linear logic is exceptionally easy to follow for one who comes to it from another language, while one who must move from it into a less linear language does so most easily at an early age. In other words, the happy results which such studies show accruing to early bilingualism, while quite real, are probably skewed by the fact that one of the languages is English. Youth would otherwise be a less consequential factor.

No language that I have ever studied has fewer inflections than English. Endings of any sort are a rarity in our tongue. The standard way of designating a plural noun is to add an s, and the standard way of designating a verb’s preterite tense is to add an ed. Beyond this, very little goes on at the end of our words. We have no cases except in pronouns (and there only two), nor have we gender endings except for the now-infamous –ess (much deplored by feminists in words like actress). We ingeniously manipulate our verbs by a system of auxiliary words—be, will, and have—which snap into place, so to speak, like a toddler’s jointed blocks. A non-English speaker, armed with an adequate dictionary and allowed time to flip through its pages, could make himself understood among us as long as our occasionally Gothic spellings did not stop him dead in his tracks. If he were in one of our restaurants and wished to alert us that fish induces in him an allergic reaction, he could look up and piece together his vital communication word by word. I+can+not+eat+fish. The word can might create problems if, upon chasing it down in his own tongue, he should find the definition, "to be able". Even so, "I not be able to eat fish" makes pretty good sense. The only other real danger that I foresee would perhaps lurk in his not looking up the pronoun I; for in many languages, the subject pronoun is expressed by a verbal ending.

The same happy experience from the other direction—an American in Paris, say—would be difficult to imagine. I honestly don’t know what, if anything, a native Frenchman would make of Je non pouvoir manger poisson, the nonsensical list of dictionary equivalents with which our Yank would be certain to emerge. I know that it doesn’t come close to Je ne peux pas manger de poisson. The partitive genitive is especially perplexing to modern English speakers (though my wife’s family in rural Georgia smells of and tastes of things: in most places such usage died with Shakespeare). Without that small preposition, and considering the rest of the sentence’s grammatical nullity, a Frenchman might well conclude that his guest didn’t want to eat this fish, or perhaps that he simply had no appetite. At least the French language, like English, expresses subject pronouns separately from their verb. Should our tourist continue to Spain or Italy, he would be sure to draw even longer stares upon himself by emphasizing all his subject pronouns unintentionally.

I find that well-meaning people without much experience of foreign language believe its study largely a matter of learning new vocabulary. You learn the words, and you plug them into place as needed: what could be simpler? The new generation of textbooks encourages such naiveté. Besides chatty dialogues at the mall and the ball game, the one feature they are sure to display prominently is the vocabulary list. Every dialogue is usually accompanied by its own list: names of foods for the visit to the restaurant, names of decorations and favors for the birthday party, and so on. Memorize the chatter template and the list, and… you’re all set for your very own birthday party! You are not set, however—not after even fifty lessons on this scale—to write "thank you" notes to those who attended the party, to describe the feeling of being a year older, to discuss how you play with your favorite gifts, or to do conduct any linguistic activity whatever beyond the template. While you could no doubt import several of your new words into these other exercises, you would still not know how to interweave them with a coherence remotely approximating native fluency. You could only repeat the futility of the American in Paris: "Bicycle… birthday… thank you."

At this rate, we might as well be urging our children to draw pictographs intended for Barnard’s Star. A boy… a dog… a smiley face. Maybe they’ll put it all together themselves, whoever they are. After all, how stupid could they be? Piece One, Piece Two, Piece Three… doesn’t everyone think that way? What other way could there be?

Point Five: There is no genuine trade-off or balancing act between verbal fluency and logic (i.e., grammar) when the object is thoughtful expression. A constant and eternal war, rather, exists between the literate’s universal audience and the speaker’s tribal clique. The implicit assumption in much of the new foreign-language pedagogy is that grammar somehow damages learning. So subliminal is this notion that I can do no more than point to things conspicuous by their absence: the tables, charts, paradigms, highlighted rules, and other loci communes of the elementary foreign language text fifty years ago. Editors do not spring forward belligerently and proclaim, "Grammar is boring! We have suppressed all grammatical instruction so as to retain the student’s interest and put him in a mood susceptible to learning!" They simply suppress all grammatical instruction.

Of course, grammar really is boring to an untrained mind, as are all abstractions. Furthermore, most of those reverend texts which were the foreign language teacher’s Bible fifty years ago do not explain abstractions very well. They lay down rules and, at most, grudgingly allow an example to slip through. Their editors may have thought that the teacher would supply further depth and color. I have never seen an elementary Latin text in wide circulation, for instance, which handled the ablative case effectively. The Ablative of Personal Agent… the Ablative of Means or Instrument… the Ablative of Manner… the Ablative of Accompaniment… my first Latin textbook was awash in these Victorian phrases—as was everyone else’s, apparently. (The graduate students of my time used to joke about the hyper-analytical character of it all: they would propose additions like the Ablative of Pecuniary Reimbursement.) As far as I know, no mass-marketed textbook has ever taken the time to explain to students that there were once many more cases than we find in historical Latin, that the ablative case had become a kind of grab bag into which other cases collapsed, that most Latin prepositions are used with the ablative precisely because that case could scarcely preserve its pristine meaning under all the debris of accumulated meanings, and so forth. In other words, textbook-writers did not foresee a child with a curious mind, or at least did not consider such a mind as deserving of encouragement. The child was to memorize and regurgitate: explanations would only confuse the issue. Through an odd and very unfortunate series of associations, Latin became a rod for bending stiff necks. Military schools, hard-line Catholic schools, and private schools with patrician reputations—places where obedience was reckoned the supreme virtue—taught Latin because it was painful, and because pain breeds character.

I suppose the writers of the new textbooks may be responding to such traditions as that. If so, they are being very childish. They would be better advised to look up their fifth-form slavemaster or Brother Bruno and punch him in the nose than to continue torturing children from the other direction. They should recover their attention from over their shoulder, where they luxuriously sneer at yesteryear’s rigid pedagogy, and watch where they are steering the new generation’s bus. Bad explanation is boring, painful, and—yes—likely to make spirited children dig in their heels against the pedagogical endeavor; but no explanation is surely at least as ruinous. I have seen this method, by the way (uprooted from Dartmouth linguist John Rassius’s "crash course" context), inflicted upon ninth-grade Latin students. The experimental textbooks contained not a syllable of English anywhere—just Latin and pictures. The pictures were meant to explain the Latin, naturally; but if one picture is worth a thousand words, how many of those thousand words are appropriate to defining the picture’s relevant aspect? Children get some very strange ideas about the meaning of vocabulary and the function of changing inflections when cajoled into "absorbing" the language rather than offered straight answers once in a while. Soon their reading of the unfamiliar tongue begins to resemble a Rorschach test. Quot homines, tot sententiae, as Terence puts it: a different version for every pair of eyes.

I do not say that an awareness of grammar does not slow down the cataract of jabber. Obviously, it does. You can’t talk as fast when you’re concerned about the clarity and precision of what you’re saying. Delay is no doubt a grievous sin in the age of clicking on "icons". (How many years will it be, I wonder, before we simply flash cards at each other, or wear head-gear whose screen does so for us?) Since the object of the lesson is communication, however, surely the happy results of thinking things through are worth a slight investment of time. To addict people to brevity until they are no longer capable of original thought, then to applaud the flash-card, stimulus-and-response method of instruction because it accelerates their meaningless jabber, is a bizarre inversion of means and ends. Not too many years ago, educators would physically slap the left hand of any student if it were detected in the act of writing. Right-handedness was highly advantageous: desks, doors, and place settings were designed to accommodate it. Beating the left-handedness out of students was thus regarded as doing them a favor. Do we really want to adopt similar measures now for the left side of our brain?

I must observe that this fascination with coffee-house gossip and cell-phone babble has too many political undertones not to have been hatched deep in the nurseries of theoretical academe. I realize that many of us recall grim encounters with the "memorize and regurgitate" pedagogy (not that I can see any transformation in the new approach, except that trivial blather has replaced rule and paradigm as the matter to be memorized). The revolutionizing of the nation’s consciousness which the academic élite is forever trying to accomplish very often reaches the boondocks as an imminently practical way of getting quicker, easier, more visible results. I shall have much more to say about this in the next section. For now, I stress that there is a distinct flavor of rabble-rousing to today’s pedagogical romance with idle chatter. The People chatter—the proletariat. According to their oppressive oligarchs, they chatter in bad grammar and malapropism… but the oligarchs would say that, wouldn’t they? They want to preserve a world where no one outside their privileged circle is able to communicate in the "proper" manner.

I hope that I have already well demonstrated how gnostic exclusivity is the province of slang, not standard usage. Popular movements are infinitely more likely to generate their own parlance as a means of nudging outsiders away. I recall a film about The Battle of the Bulge (Battleground [1949], starring Van Johnson) wherein a well-educated American lieutenant is very nearly shot by his own men because he doesn’t know anything about baseball—and therefore, in their minds, can only be a German! Or consider the case of one "Big Archibald" MacPhail, a Highlander whose traditional virtues distinguished him among his seventeenth-century clansmen:

He once met a Lowlander by Achnacone and greeted him in the Highland way: Beannachd Dhia dhuit, a dhuine!" God’s blessing on you, sir. The Lowlander, having no Gaelic, but seeing that some response was expected, replied that it was indeed a fine day. "Foolish man," said Big Archibald [in Gaelic], "do you despise the word of God?" Before the Lowlander had time to decide what this might mean, he was struck down by MacPhail’s sword. Big Archibald took the dead man’s shoes, musket, and a guinea from his coat pocket, and walked on to Ballachulish. There he told the Stewart laird what had happened, adding that to his mind it had been a profitable morning.6

This is the Land of Milk and Honey which awaits us in the post-literate world of Everyman’s preferred jabber. It isn’t a working man’s paradise of straight talk—of Mark Twains and Harry Trumans—where Jane and Jill are comparing how many teeth their babes have lost while Jack and Joe share a beer over the football game. That, to be sure, is part of the tableau (which is already insipid enough: how many of these Janes and Jacks would Professor Jones want in her revolutionary seminar?). Eventually, however, these people and their seemingly innocuous prattle become a tyranny. Everyone has to like what they like, buy what they buy, and talk as they talk. The proletariat has expectations of behavior which are every bit as suffocating as those of the middle class (a blunt truth with which the academic élite would be familiar if it ever had lengthy contact with working-class settings.) The great difference between the two is the universalizing tendency within middle class standards: the tendency, that is, to create customs and manners valid for all human beings, not just for this or that tribe. It is a tendency nourished by literacy far more than by capitalism (indeed, the historical development of open markets was itself fueled by literacy); for written communication is constantly seeking to justify its reasoning to an audience as large as the wide earth, whereas the oral communication seeks merely to lace itself into the swift flow of an exchange between two or three or twenty participants. To the latter kind of communicant, what’s right is what carries his raft into the smoothly running midstream. To the former kind, what’s right is what can be objectively demonstrated before all possible comers.

Grammar is hard, especially if it is poorly taught. Correct diction is the struggle of a lifetime, and each day conceals little blunders. Yet when the goal of all this toil and struggle is an open marketplace of ideas whose value is pegged, not by their point of origin, but by their intrinsic coherence and common humanity, isn’t the effort worthwhile? If some people start farther back in the race than others, should we exhort them to make haste, or call off the race? In view of the natural human zeal for competition (what is commonly human, as we know, is not always humane), we cannot suppose that other, less fairly arbitrated races will not arise. Should we not therefore embrace rules adumbrated over a centuries-long search for fair play rather than let every neighborhood bully make up his own? In terms of teaching foreign language, how can we believe that ignoring grammar to chase after the moment’s "hottest" phrases will prove a liberating exercise? At best, the "gangs" whose badges our students end up wearing in their speech will be benign little cliques of thoughtless consumers, stopping for tacos on their way to the movies, rather than Fascists and Maoists with passwords and slogan-catechisms.

Point Six: Vocabulary relating to intimate household and familial details is always more idiosyncratic than that relating to matters of more public currency. The latter often has cognates in geographically neighboring languages, and hence offers significant support for further education when compared the former. The above remark is probably a rather opaque view of a scene which becomes crystal-clear from any kind of close-up angle. The basic facts are these. A language is usually a series of overlays, beginning with origins so distant that they blur into pre-history. More superficial strata are deposited over the prehistoric core as neighboring societies invade or intermarry or otherwise merge with the local tribe. Usually these neighbors will be rooted, at least to some extent, in the same hazy source as the specific Language X under examination, so that learning any one language in the group will provide a headstart toward learning others. Together, they all form a family. Nevertheless, X has a few words all its own. Most of these belong to objects or behaviors which are more domestic than formal, more intimate than public, or more rude than sublime. The words for "family" and "reunion" may be shared, for instance, while the word for "stepchild" or "napkin" may be entirely unique to the mountains of X.

By focusing on those informal and even intimate occasions so fertile in chatty dialogue, the new foreign-language pedagogy deprives students of a chance to prepare a broad basis for studying other languages later on. It mires them in vocabulary words without cognates in any other tongue. The list below compares several words as they exist in French, Italian, and Spanish—languages which, of course, are all descended from Latin. The more formal or general words have been arranged on the left, the more informal or specific words on the right. The results are quite striking.

thought                  pencil

penser                  crayon

pensiero               matita

pensamiento          lápiz

 

hope                        pen

espérance               stylo

speranza                penna

esperanza              piuma

 

song                     grandfather

chant                   grand’père

canto                      nonno

canto                     abuelo

 

book                       shoe

livre                      soulier

libro                     calzone

libro                      zapato

 

fish                           fox

poisson                 renard

pesce                     volpe

pez                         zorro

 

life                          meal

vie                         repas

vita                       pasto

vida                     comida

In most cases, the Italian and Spanish words on the left are either identical or different by only a letter. French is a little more distant from both, yet its kinship bond is still strong enough that anyone who knew Italian or Spanish would stand a good chance of guessing the French word. If we look to the right, however, we find a clear parting of the ways everywhere except for repas and pasto (which are nonetheless so dissimilar that only the best guesser could leap from one to the other). Just as clear, surely, is the reason for the departure: the words on the right are less formal, abstract, general, communal, or—in a "centripetal" sense—civilized. The contrast between words for "fish" and "fox" is indicative of how little politics or élitism is involved in the distinction. These are not "high brow" versus "low brow" words. "Fish" is simply more generic: were we to add "trout" to our list, we would once again find the road dividing. At the same time, "fish" is no airy abstraction, any more than "song" or "book". To desire that students learn a large quantity of such words as would appear on the left of this diagram is not to suggest that young children be tortured with philosophical readings far beyond their years. It is simply to ask that songs and books receive a little more air-time in instructional materials than pens, pencils, spoons, and shoelaces.7

There is an implicit connection between a language’s unique words of intimacy and its culture’s sense of having preserved itself. Even cultures which have been overrun and colonized by another power—have been so vanquished, indeed, that the alien tongue significantly fuses with their own—can take a certain solace in the number of "uninfected" words within the domestic threshold. The Celtic peoples in the British Isles, for example, not only have substantially un-Anglicized languages of their own (i.e., Welsh and Gaelic: Cornish, I am told, is a dead issue): they also widely circulate unique coinages in the "invader’s" tongue for intimate objects and relationships, such as boyo for "young man" and girsha for "girl". The same languages had earlier resisted Latin in cultural skirmishes which may now be reviewed quite clinically, since their final blows have long been struck. Welsh was far more influenced than Irish Gaelic by the Roman presence (for there was no such presence on Irish soil). Hence the language abounds in Latin words for military and political office (amherawdyr from imperator, "emperor, general"), words for weapons (cleddyf from gladius [sword] and saeth from sagitta [arrow]), and especially words for literate endeavor (ystyr from historia [story] and llyfr from liber [book]).8  Yet the Welsh domestic setting bears practically no trace of Latin nomenclature. While the invader’s culture deeply infused public life, it was virtually invisible in private life.

I raise this matter because it helps to explain some of the volatility of the "second language" issue in American politics. At least some of the resentment, I believe, often registered by Anglo-Americans over other languages in their midst—and here we might as well name Spanish outright—is caused by today’s favored pedagogy, which invades the home’s inner sanctum rather than contenting itself with roads, trees, birds, and clouds. A child may quite possibly come home babbling "cupcake" or "toilet" in Spanish before he knows how to say "flower" or "horse". I doubt that this astonishingly subtle "invasion of the patriarchy" can have been planned at any level but the most intuitive by the textbook-writing élite in the academy. There is most certainly such an invasion going on at conscious levels elsewhere, however, and I would by no means dismiss the notion that its captains intuit how subversive would be little Jimmy’s or Janie’s request in Spanish for a birthday party. Whether the parents of these children deserve to be wrenched from their complacency is not a judgment which should be handed down from an academic’s desk; but that they should not be so wrenched through their manipulated children must be morally transparent to anyone but a fanatic.

***

Let us pursue the broader objectives of what I call the academic élite. Let us stand back from specific classroom strategies which seem designed, not to teach students another language thoroughly, but to prepare them for parachuting into villages where it is spoken and making their way along alien streets undetected. In its entirety, this pedagogical phenomenon presents us with a very odd prospect—odd enough that it begs an explanation. Its theorists and champions cannot argue that they have simply tossed out the tedious rote learning of yesteryear, for they haven’t. If anything, this method involves more commission of senseless linguistic chunks to memory than ever. At least yesteryear’s drills ("amo, amas, amat…") inculcated paradigms which applied sweepingly to the language in question, and thereby liberated the child to go forth and compose or read virtually anything with the help of a lexicon. Today’s "hello, how are you?" drills are perhaps less tedious in that they apply to narrow, "real life" circumstances—but the same narrowness inhibits them from being exported to other circumstances. The student who has been forced to memorize dozens of lines of polite jabber is in nowise fit to go forth and read the language’s great novelists (if it has any: can the prattle-proctors, I wonder, name a couple?). Thanks to the demotic, quasi-slang nature of conversational language and its tendency toward top-heaviness with irregular forms, it is at best a tortuous route to great literature.

The cynic will already have unearthed a couple of motives behind "chatter" pedagogy’s far-and-wide adoption. First, it instantly captures the audience with an illusion of being fully "plugged in" to reality; second, people can teach it who have little or no knowledge of literature. It’s an easy sale, and the seller needn’t have spent years in school. I hasten to add that some teachers chatter fluidly, eloquently, and even beautifully. I will not deny a certain jealousy of such types, for I have never enjoyed the gift of gab in any tongue, including my native English. Still, one would have expected that the trend-setters at major universities, where chatter-strategies have not only been blessed but were originally designed, might stick up for literacy. The academy would hardly strike the layman as a likely place to encounter persistent hostility to literate culture. How can such antagonism exist where people have dedicated themselves to higher learning?

Sooner or later, I suppose I must risk whatever lucidity my discussion has by mentioning deconstruction, the dominant theory in departments of language and literature for the past thirty years or so (now mercifully in ebb). Academic readers may have noted with irony that the neo-Marxist romanticizing of ordinary parlance so visible in the chatter-texts exactly reverses the polarities of deconstruction—or appears to do so. Thirty-five years ago, Jacques Derrida delivered the pronounce-ment (extravagant from the start, and extravagantly defended since he made it in Of Grammatology) that writing actually evolved before speech in some sense. We are to suppose that Western culture’s speakers have harbored a grudge against its writers since the neighbor of Rousseau’s caveman scribbled, "He said that was his." I can see no possible profit in reviewing Derrida’s rhetorical loop-de-loops. The gist of it all is that the written text, by fixing words for subsequent careful examination, exposes that they are lies. Nothing is at the bottom of anything—but professional mouthpieces like priests and bards can get away with propagandizing for the political élite as long as their lofty claims are not put under the magnifying glass. Literacy does precisely this disservice to the ruling powers: hence they vilify it.

Indeed, there is truth in what Derrida claims if you can strain the political dialectic out of it (which leaves behind, however, a very bland fare). Writing, at least of the alphabetic sort which can be quickly learned by multitudes, eventually wears away oral-traditionalism beneath a steady onslaught of astute perceptions and rational qualifications.9  Yet this is not where Derrida and his footsoldiers want to go. The whole point of devising a Manichaean tug-of-war between writing and speech was to pillory the West’s conventional leadership. We have all been fed a steady diet of propaganda for centuries now: that is the message. The written/spoken rigamarole is a convenient means to a glorious end.

So it turns out that deconstructionists and chatter-champions are not at loggerheads, after all. In fact, they are on the same side of the battering ram, working in complementary motions to level the edifice of meaning, law, tradition, faith, order, hierarchy—everything resistant to the chaotic forces of whimsy which pass for freedom among this crowd. As far as I can tell, there was never even any sort of intellectual negotiation between Derrida’s urbane, facetious punsters and the cocksure crusaders who shared their beds around campus. That fact is quite astonishing. Just imagine. The deconstructionist suspends belief in everything, absolutely everything (for this is his one and only absolute); the neo-Marxist romantically "postpones" nirvana to a vague, gilded future and derives his rigid marching orders therefrom. The latter seems the preeminent example of all that the former chuckles over. Indeed, when post-structuralist "scholars" had to write about something distinctly literary to win their tenure, they almost invariably chose a romantic author—a poet rapt in self-aware self-delusion before a Grecian urn or chasing a waif which he knows to be incaptible.10  Bemused though they were, these same romantics bequeathed to us the lunacy of bloody revolution for a utopian vision—not general upheaval in the ancient world’s tawdry sense, when mobs backed a charismatic figure to loot under his banner (res novae), but vast slaughter of live humanity left and right to incarnate (or incarnadine) a "dream". If ever any sane adult might be wooed to deconstruction’s sophistical paralysis, it would be through the contemplation of such "principled" excesses as ideology has visited upon us in the last two hundred years. The rhetorical shell games of Hegel and Marx, no less than those of Benjamin Constant or Victor Hugo, veritably scream for deconstruction, if by that is understood demolition through mature analysis.

How could these two mentalities possibly coexist, and even be considered mutually supportive? The answer, I repeat, lies in that great common enemy of all hipster intellectuals, bourgeois decorum: common sense, common decency, common humanity… the suffocating blandness (as the intellectual often finds it) of life in a smoothly functioning, civilized society. If I have stressed above the logical incompatibility of deconstruction’s dégagé philosophers and the engagé campus radicals who sat at their feet, it is to demonstrate that no rigorous logical connection between the two ever existed—no developing pedigree of doctrinal kinship such as one would expect of thoughtful people. On the contrary, the idle intellectual’s script for two centuries now has contained little but phrases intended to shock the audience (or to delight an audience of self-selected rebels, I should say, by shocking the tastes of those not in attendance). The academy’s loathing of the bourgeoisie is a phenomenon extending well back into the nineteenth century. Indeed, Voltaire was theatrically crying écrasez l’infâme as the eighteenth rumbled to its unhappy conclusion.

Deconstruction’s grandiose claim to epochal insight is therefore absurd. We see no significant transition here: we see only the rise of the middle class, some of whose brightest children grow deliriously frustrated because their upward mobility is impeded or because pushy scoundrels are elbowing past them. An argument—a rational concatenation of facts—is not what we should expect from this crowd. We need merely note who is always deemed right by the rhetoric and who always wrong. On the wrong side, a system whose hierarchies have stood for centuries and are generally defensible by objective reason; and on the right side, everything anti-systematic. To paraphrase Milton’s Satan (another counter-conformist whose freedom is enslaved to shock effect), "Chaos be thou my order!"

For foreign language instruction, all this means that today’s reigning neglect of literature and grammar in favor of demotic parlance should not in any wise be construed as a back-to-basics rejection of pedantic folderol. On the contrary, the new trend is perfectly in step with the deeper rhythm of deconstructive chic. Forget about those theoretical tomes than which nothing more impenetrable to the common man—and the streetcorner chatterbox—has ever been written. (Or pause for a moment to reflect that these tomes, in their illegible jargon, tortured syntax, and disguised ignorance of basic grammar are indeed an assault upon literacy from another direction.) The grand design behind this campaign of many fronts is very simple: the subversion of the canonical, the traditional, the acceptable.

Now, the old establishment (and "old" is not redundant here, for the system is already a mere memory) was scarcely a hotbed of "English first" zealotry. If anything, its stalwarts put Latin first, or ancient Greek—or if English, then the English of Shakespeare and Bacon and Dryden, certainly not the picaresque oratory of the barber shop. And they fostered Spanish of the same caliber. In college Spanish departments, one studied (as well as Cervantes and the picaresque—for there has always been a barber in Seville) Lope de Vega, Calderón, and Cadalso. Today’s chatterers no more aim their pedagogy toward the bright constellations of Spanish literature than their high-brow deconstructive comrades addressed unreadable treatises to that quadrant of the sky. Frankly, I don’t know how anyone could deconstruct literary convention and human bombast more effectively than Cervantes did (except, perhaps, Ariosto). A deconstructionist would have to turn tail and run from such testimony lest he be found naked in his own sophomorism.

No, the variously styled "old boys" or "dead white guys" were not trying to silence Spanish-speaking voices: on the contrary, they required that their children speak—or, to be exact, read—in more voices than one now finds in the typical public library. The war is not with oppressive Anglo-Saxon patriarchs who want all other comers to go back where they came from: if such "barbarophobes" are fast becoming a new establishment, they were never so before. This is the war in which student radicals occupied the administration building at Columbia, bullied professors of literature across the nation into teaching such "relevant" matter as rock lyrics, and voted with their parents’ checkbooks to eliminate philosophy and foreign language (by the way) from the core curriculum. It is the war against culture: against the Western tradition of independent thought, open discussion, and common-sense objectivity. Everything unfamiliar, capricious, intractable, unstable, anomalous, ungovernable, or irrational has long been stockpiled for ammunition. While deconstructive sappers were attempting to undermine the very possibility of rational discourse, hordes of barefoot buck-privates (whom the Greeks called idiotês) asserted the existence of lunacy with lupine howls from the trenches or suicidal leaps from the battlements. The latter have now taken over the siege.

And what is it which interests such people about Spanish? For the debate about foreign language in the United States is really about Spanish, and more so every day: does that fact in itself not suggest the answer? The Spanish-speaking population is much the largest group of Americans whose native tongue is not English. Hence it is an ideal wedge for penetrating the armor of common custom, of bourgeois convention. And why is it, then, that the commonwealth was not faltering earlier under the more intense "assault" of Latin, Greek, and French transmitted tidily by the educational system—was, indeed, more stable and judicious than ever, to all appearances? Because languages were then taught with a heavy emphasis on literacy—on reading and writing rather than speaking. Literacy fosters independent thought, which fosters an interest in open discussion, which fosters an interest in reaching objective consensus… all the centripetal values which build a sense of common humanity. Of these the antinomians want no part. Spanish-speaking Americans have caught their eye because they are a minority, and in many ways a frightening minority to Anglo America. The typical WASP cannot so much as comprehend their speech, even if he or she took four years of Spanish in college: that much is already dismaying.11  A literary education in Spanish would surely diffuse this tension somewhat: for it is true, after all, that you can’t scorn a people whose literature you have read. On the other hand, to introduce the colloquial palaver of this "suspect" people through the back doors of those who fear it and into their very hearths—by having all the little bourgeois toddlers trip home babbling it, no less—seems to me a surefire method of escalating alarm.

I have already discussed how conquered peoples have conventionally been able to conserve their own words for life’s most homely and most private objects, even under a massive effort of colonization (Point Six). Here we see from the textbook-writing élite, not a grand initiative to enhance the literacy of both cultures concerned, or indeed of either culture—but what looks, instead, very like an incendiary nurture of incomprehension among both cultures, and particularly aimed at the dominant culture’s foundations. Sandra Stotsky has noticed the same tactics in a slightly different context, where, at first glance, the textbook industry seems intent upon bewildering children rather than insinuating itself into their parties with candy and toys. Her thorough study of English readers (of reading texts, that is) for elementary students reveals a disturbing tendency to impose indecipherable, unpronounceable foreign words upon bourgeois scenes of intimacy. Bear in mind that Stotsky is considering the texts from which young children learn English. While the same foreign words might be more pronounceable in a foreign language class, they are presented in a setting where their correct elocution—and, indeed, sometimes their basic meaning—remains an enigma (for footnotes or explanations in the teacher’s guide are not always forthcoming). How could the effort to destabilize the young person’s warmest household rituals in bursts of "otherness" possibly be made more apparent? Writes Stotsky of one such passage (which, within fewer than one hundred words, hurls ten Swahili nouns at a fourth-grade readership):

How likely are you to see any of these Swahili words again in outside independent reading? The answer? Not very likely. They are not words that contribute to the vocabulary needed by the typical middle or secondary school student in an English-speaking country.

One can only speculate why such a story is offered as fourth-grade reading material since the teacher guide provides no justification for including it for instructional purposes. Is it there to teach nonblack children to respect other languages? To enhance the self-esteem of black children on the grounds that this may have been the language of their ancestors in Africa? (In fact, most of their ancestors came from the western part of Africa and spoke other languages.) Or to pique black children’s interest in learning Swahili as a second language? Whatever the reason, students and their teachers will spend valuable time learning the meaning of words with no real utility for English speakers, readers, and writers.12

To Stotsky’s far-from-rhetorical questions, I would respond with emphasis, "Destabilization!" Unknowingly, she produces in her sample passages the very kinds of foreign words which I cited above in Point Six as informal, intimate, or rude (in the literal sense of rustic or unpolished). These words are dubious enough even in the foreign language classroom, for the student in that setting is almost as constricted by their narrowness of application as the student in English class is by their being utterly incomprehensible. What clearly shines forth in both classrooms is the intimacy of the setting; and I ask any sane adult, would the "colonization" of this setting as it occurs in your child’s life by a culture whose words and ways you find mysterious not stir you to fear, and even to animosity? If we grant that perhaps you should not find these alien ways fearful—that you should probably go back to school yourself—is the infiltration of your own most private rituals a very prudent or humane means of eliciting your benevolent interest in the other?

With regard to Hispanic culture (and Stotsky concedes that most incidents of oracular inscrutability in textbooks involve Spanish), it is worth stressing that Spanish-speakers do not profit from the academy’s antagonizing of an Anglo mainstream which largely decides their fate. If the average American is already annoyed that he cannot communicate his order at the local cafeteria, he is downright neurotic about what he perceives as a new crime wave. In many areas (especially urban centers receiving a steady influx of immigrants, legal and otherwise, from very poor nations), the middle-class establishment is painfully aware that crime has risen—violent crime, above all. The phrase which haunts English nightmares is not Buenos días, amigo, but Plata o plomba!—"Bucks or a bullet!" The physically dangerous side to the Hispanic diaspora, while lending itself to demagogic exploitation, is statistical fact. The all-Spanish newscast out of Dallas-Fort Worth which I regularly watch features a story or two every week about the disproportionately high rates of homicide, traffic fatality, and alcohol and drug abuse among Hispanic youths. To these figures might be added the exorbitant rates of larceny practiced by the fluently bilingual upon recent immigrants—withholding wages from illegals, for instance, and pocketing money supposed to be wired to relatives down south. (Such crimes, I note in passing, would be largely expunged if immigrants were taught literacy in Spanish at the same time as or before they learned English.) To say that these children of the south are most often their own victims is also statistically accurate, but such sad figures and numbers remain a "public relations" disaster before a tremulous Anglo majority. When we—and here I mean all of us—consider that certain of our "best and brightest" who write textbooks are royally amusing themselves with the situation’s volatility, we should not shame to feel grave indignation.

Now, Hispanic culture (if such a thing still exists) is nothing if not conservative. Mothers worry about their daughters bearing children out of wedlock, fathers feel humiliated when they cannot feed their children, and brothers or sons as well as fathers will illegally cross a border hundreds of miles away to siphon a little money back home. This community is hit hard by the occasional violence of life on the edge, and is eager to work its way toward something better. To offer welfare payments or an abundance of blue-collar jobs, either one or both together, without also offering literacy is like clearing two escape routes from a burning house without applying water to a yet manageable flame. I repeat: reading and writing turn people into independent thinkers. An immigrant Hispanic boy who reads will perhaps not require membership in a gang to find emotional stability. His sister will perhaps not feel compelled to bestow sexual favors lest she be shunned. Their father, when out of a job, will perhaps not squander precious pennies on beer and cigarettes, even if reading does not successfully steer him through that famous sea of Job Applications to the fabled Better Position. A poster in our local library has actor James Edward Olmos declaring like some iron-jawed propagandist, Leer es poder—"Reading is power."13  This is true, I suspect, in ways which never occurred to the poster’s designers. Quite apart from enhancing income, reading affects how we live: what we buy, what we eat, what we do for pleasure. It renders us stronger on the inside—less vulnerable to circumstance, more self-reliant. It is a resource from which people already disposed to take responsibility for others would very much profit.

Am I saying with insufferable condescension that immigrant paupers should improve themselves by learning how to read? Well, I certainly believe that we should all improve ourselves, and the literate life is a shortcut to improvements of the deepest kind. Inasmuch as the pain of striving to "write truth" is that of honest prayer and confession, I am not disposed to apologize for urging anyone to improve so. If that seems insufferable to some, then I would ask them why they do not find instability, doubt, despair, and self-annihilation in the manic hysteria of gang-and-drug culture to be still less sufferable. But, of course, flight from such ruinous miseries is convergence back toward the human center of bourgeois, "universalist" values. Better that our saddest social statistics should continue to rise than that our academic élite should lose the Hispanic community as a fulcrum against middle-class America!

Consider the following passage from Emilio Romero’s novel about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, The Peace Begins Never. The hope which Romero claims here for all Spaniards, I say parenthetically, seems so humane and reasonable that it fully deserves extension to all people everywhere:

This people of mine deeply moved me with its originality, simplicity, and grandeur. From a certain perspective, it was indeed determined to stage a revolution to live better—yet under the condition that this revolution not remove everything which constituted our emotional patrimony. The communists call this bourgeois prejudice; and, in reality, I believed that the best revolution would be that which would make us all bourgeois, not proletarian. At the bottom of every naïve Spanish communist, there wasn’t a desire to impoverish the rich, but to enrich oneself—to be able to become an engineer or soldier or doctor, to marry a handsome young woman and go to the opera. Any revolution that would not pursue a higher level of life was no revolution at all, but a regression.14

When I say that literacy is the entrance to this vision, not just financially but also—and in particular—psychologically, I mean the reading-and-writing habit of life in any tongue. I should be quite happy to see our public education system fund a program for our Hispanic fellow-citizens which taught meaningful literacy in Spanish. Having a ballot printed in two languages seems to me no great threat to our society. On the other hand, having people who can barely read a ballot, whatever its language, and who seldom read anything longer than a paragraph is very possibly the greatest threat any democracy can ever face. As long as our citizens read (i.e., wrestle with each printed idea in their minds until they take possession of it), I shouldn’t care if they do the reading in Spanish, French, Urdu, or Mandarin. Our critical problem is not a multiplicity of tongues, but a paucity of reading matter and of readers.

Certainly my young son’s school, which I believe to be the finest in the area, has always exhorted him to read and write. I am told that he presently reads four years above his grade level—and, of course, this delights me. All the more cause to wonder, though, why the most advanced Spanish textbooks used in his institution’s middle school offer no literary readings: just dialogues ad infinitum. Forget about when my son will ever be able to read Romulo Gallegos or Antonio Azorín (two of my favorites): when will a girl or boy from a Spanish-speaking household ever be able to write a thoughtful editorial in Spanish—or read one—even if that child should attend this fine school? Why must both native English-speakers and native Spanish-speakers be denied access to the Spanish literary tradition? How long must all our children keep drowning in this "total immersion" of Arcadian chatter where funny old men dance and candy falls from the rafters?

For Arcadia is a critical point of connection between Ivy League topsy-turvyists and the dedicated, warm-hearted teachers of Middleville. I have already alleged (with an appearance, no doubt, of mean-spiritedness) that the social-engineering project to force Hispanic culture down mainstream America’s throat appeals to the average teacher, not because he or she burns to stupify the bourgeoisie, but because chatter requires few lesson plans and little formal training. (In fact, it doesn’t really require a teacher—those teachers who have staked their future on a strategy so compatible with video technology are sawing off their limb of the proverbial tree.) Naturally, there are more humane motives behind this pedagogy, as well. The socialist vision of one big happy family sharing all its toys is hopelessly, even absurdly unfitted to adult reality: adults don’t like to lend their toys to others who abuse them. Yet the share-all frolic around the Maypole is a perfectly plausible—and even commendable—objective for an elementary school classroom. Traditions are not riveted into minds at this point. Susie and Ahmed and Joaquín and Bahar are just so many children with so many colorful names to one another, and their celebrating Christmas in different ways—or celebrating different holidays around Christmas time—is an intriguing curiosity rather than an invincible wall. A good teacher can effectively stress common humanity for a few of these Arcadian years before the gates of Eden close (as they most surely will: for the rivets are applied from within, even if the traditions are transmitted from without). To teach another language by drawing children into the intimate quarters of another culture—the kitchen, the birthday party, the year’s most exotic feasts and vigils—is thus a tempting way to rally them round a humanitarian morale (and, dare I say, a "universalist" ethic).

But the "party" approach remains, above all, a practical one; and it is to this pragmatism rather than to any excessively Arcadian commitment that cultural subversion owes its securest footholds in the elementary curriculum. Children, especially very young ones, like singing puppets and dancing clowns, whose appearance on the scene always imposes a chatty, extroverted occasion (Hola, niños!). Of course, birthday parties and holidays, besides being magically special, are also highly social occasions eliciting steady dialogue. Chatter in such surroundings is likely to interest the young student, even if he or she doesn’t understand it. And who knows? Since children are far more apt to soak up piñata and Feliz Navidad! than mansedumbre, maybe they will also soak up a few irregular verbs. A strategy which commandeers bright images and festive trim plainly holds youthful attention better than a lecture on grammar—and nothing good can happen without attentiveness!

To such bourgeois pragmatism as this, the élite game plan seems wonderfully savvy about adapting its methods. Time and time again, Middle America does the footwork for the Ivory Tower’s most fantastical causes. And why not? The two "polarities" here—the academic Left and the bourgeois Right—are really just alternatives of the pragmatic. Insanely idealistic though the socially engineered Arcadia of Marxism is, its furtherance justifies a cold, calculating suspension of all moral principles to the faithful. (Or, to state this view properly, all moral principles are a bourgeois illusion, sustained in the hall of mirrors which deconstruction exposes.) Ideological "change agents" can comfortably harrow the middle class with the incomprehensible chatter of its gardeners and nannies even as they woo its children with cakes and Christmas presents. The war, as I have said, has many fronts. Why wouldn’t it, since its objective is a romantic fusion with the indefinitely remote Not Here, Not Now—the n’importe où hors du monde away from which deconstruction (one would have thought) warns its congregants?

For their part, the solid bourgeois citizens whose children are becoming multilingual jabberers incapable of parsing a verb in any tongue are the most unlikely collaborators of all in this sad conspiracy. In the long run, they really don’t mind having their Anglo Christmases and birthdays go Spanish, or even seeing the Fourth of July merge hazily with Cinco de Mayo. After all, a holiday’s a holiday! They themselves have so heartily embraced the post-literate life that their rituals are skin deep, their inner sancta wired for cable and the Internet. As sanguinary as tribal disputes can be over arbitrary boundaries or meaningless items of dress (one slip of the tongue can get your head cut off, as Big Archibald reminds us), they are also soluble at what seems to a literate person the most superficial of levels: the pragmatic. Cinco de Mayo makes money. Hang out a sign, stock a few specialty knick-knacks, and watch the month of May soar into the black. You can’t hang out a sign—you don’t know Spanish? Ask your child. All the kids are learning Spanish in school now, and it’s not that useless stuff in old novels and poems that nobody reads. My son, your daughter, are going to know how to handle this lingo so that the average José with a dirty roll of untaxed bills in his pocket from a law-breaking employer will understand it. And a bill’s a bill, you know: the bank doesn’t deduct points for dirtiness, or even for tax-evasion.

That, of course, is the sordid side of the bourgeoisie—the side from which so many bright young adolescents were seeking refuge when they entered graduate school and adopted some neo-Marxist (or quasi-deconstructive, or crypto-nihilist) philosophy. The literate bourgeois historically sought liberation from the arbitrary chains of tradition to amass wealth, yes; but he also amassed knowledge of faraway places in the process of opening new markets, he learned how to treat those faraway customers civilly, and he began to suspect that a spiritual sameness unites all human beings beneath the differing skin tones and headdresses. In him, the god of goodness found a conduit. Unfortunately (from a marketing point of view), too much spiritual knowledge leads to too little interest in the world, which leads to declining profits and collapsing businesses. At some point, then, the bourgeois was forced to choose between the spiritual opportunities which venal curiosity had accidentally revealed to him and the worldly opportunities which directly satisfied his venal ambition. I venture to say (in the certainty of drawing much censure from "patriots") that we of the United States are living in the twilight of our predominantly venal choices. We have gone so far as actually to abandon that literacy, with all of its attendant habits (independence, responsibility, belief in objective goodness), which rendered us capable of arbitrating the world’s disputes. At the moment, we remain better arbiters, in my opinion, than anyone else around us… but how long can we be so, as we turn into utter pragmatists? If our most pressing concern about the very language in which we think is that our orders are not being processed conveniently, to what level of thinking have we descended? If our fondest hope for the second language which our children are being taught is that they may process more orders in that tongue for a higher profit, at what point do they learn from us the end of human existence?

Pragmatists, one and all: the élite textbook-writer, who will pull any punch to disrupt and destabilize; the teacher in the trenches, who will adopt any strategy as long as it reduces rowdiness and boredom; the all too insouciant parent, who will submit his child to any text-taught outrage or absurdity as long as a good job shimmers at the end of the rocky pedagogical road. I have been trying to promote the view for some years that material pragmatism is at last suicidal, since men and women are at last not material beings. The analysis—and it is often painful analysis—which literacy imposes upon their thinking is inestimably precious in how it awakens the sense of an inner, invisible, immaterial, life of universal value. On this basis alone, the shift in our instructional methods from literacy to speaking is a tragedy, whether we find it occurring in foreign language pedagogy or English or history or the sciences. Though few of us can influence the textbook industry, we should resist the shift in the classroom even if levels of boredom rise and resist it at home even when we cannot punctuate parental counsel with expensive toys. We should apply ourselves to recovering our human dignity.

Quite beyond that, however, and for the reasons detailed in this essay, teaching another language by conversational chatter is simply bad teaching. Use a standard as pragmatic as you like: it remains unwieldy, even indefensible. Our English-speaking children need a more generalized sense of the rules. Our Spanish-speaking neighbors’ children need the same thing, not only to understand our "book-learned" version of their language but to reassemble their ever more fragmented dialects. By continuing down the present path, we assure both the rootlessness of our own children’s language skills and the eventual dissolution of the languages they are trying to learn. And all for what? For a few more sales of piñatas? For a few more hours per week without lesson-planning? For a few more clever jabs at those selfish, heartless hypocrites of the bourgeoisie? Any shrewd huckster could make that out to be a very poor bargain.

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