Learn language and celebrate difference
June 23rd 2010 03:47
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From: The Australian
GETTING along with others is a good reason to study a foreign tongue.
WE'VE heard quite a bit of discussion recently - with the release of Asia Education Foundation reports on the state of Asian language education in our schools - about the value of learning an Asian language for Australia's future.
Some see greater value in staying with European languages or simply sticking to English. The debate raises a fundamental question: why do we teach languages at all in schools?
There can be only one justification: because learning a language is educational. It opens up to us something about the nature of human beings and human social life and, in discovering these, develops our cognitive capacities; that is, it teaches us to think better.
Much the same can be said for studying quadratic equations or learning about a battle in history. All three areas offer only potential benefits, of course; actualising that potential is the role of the teacher and students.
The study itself may never be useful in some directly applied sense for most of the students in any one class, but the deeper learning that derives from engaging in it certainly will. And there will be some who do, in fact, make direct or indirect applied use of the knowledge itself.
People are naturally ethnocentric and the world they know is the world unless this complacency is interrupted.
One reason we send children to school is to meet and be among people who are not exactly the same as themselves because this will teach them to get along with others and to understand better who they are and why they choose to be like that. Getting along with others recognises the right of others to exist, to have an equitable share of goods, to be heard. Others' acceptance of the same principle benefits us in the same way.
This almost always entails having to cope with difference, and appreciating, though not necessarily approving, how others go about managing life's challenges. In many cases it will offer opportunities to learn new and effective ways of doing things that differ from what is done in the learner's own society, from cooking to running an organisation, from playing music to dealing with disputes.
In the same way, while studying one's own language is important for developing mastery of it and understanding how it functions in relation to the world, learning a second or foreign language, by its very foreignness, brings much of that functioning into focus.
Language reflects the beliefs, values and action strategies that humans have developed to live in the world and reveals not only them to us but also us to ourselves. Learning any language has this potential. But those from societies that have developed very differently from our own, which are based on a different core philosophy, offer the greatest differences and hence the greatest potential for rich education.
School education needs to be about the present if it is to interest students.
It is also always part of preparation for the future of the individual and society. Societies have several needs in this respect: they must remain linked to their own histories but also prepare for the new that is likely to come.
The languages offered in our schools need to reflect the bonds of our past and the openings towards our future, and some overseeing is needed to ensure that at least some of each are maintained in the community.
In today's Australia, Asian languages are among those that particularly fit into the category of creating future openings.
Individuals can feel bonds with particular societies for family reasons or simply aesthetic appeal, and so they may seek to forge links with what is part of their own tradition or a way of being they admire; or it may be the very exotic nature of a society that constitutes its appeal for others.
There are also those not instantly attracted to otherness and they need help to discover the fascination of difference.
In the area of work or even leisure, such as travel, whatever the actual language used to arrange business, the human meanings embedded in the language will derive from the culture of those communicating.
Understanding that the world can be organised in different ways, that assumptions need to be checked because people from other societies believe and value things differently, are understandings that develop from language learning, just as does the capacity to suspend value judgments and deal with puzzles patiently, and with imagination. All very useful for real life living.
Jane Orton is director of the Chinese Teacher Training Centre at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and author of the Asia Education Foundation report The Current State of Chinese: Language Education in Australian Schools.
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Yup, as it helps to diminish the barrier between different races and promote unity...