The Modern Humanities
MORE than once we have insisted on the severe handicap under which this country labours as a trading nation owing to its casual and neglectful attitude towards the study of living foreign languages. Official confirmation is now forthcoming in the Second Interim Report of the Committee on Education for Salesmanship. The Committee visited Germany, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, and Switzerland, to study the organization in each country for modern language teaching, and they were evidently deeply impressed by what they saw and heard. We did not need the Report, of course, to know that the training in modern languages in this country still leaves much to be desired, and the main cause of the higher status of modern languages in the countries visited is, rightly diagnosed as not so much superior inherent ability in the pupils—or better teaching—as in " the keen appre- ciation of the intrinsic importance of modern hut- guages."
Because the Committee here seems to have hit the nail on the head we are rather disappointed that the trouble has not been analysed more profoundly, and traced to its source. The Committee takes throughout a too narrow view of the purpose of modern language instruction. Evidently they had in mind all the time boys and girls entering commercial employment at about sixteen, either from the county or municipal secondary schools or from post-primary institutions. Similarly, they concentrate too much, in our opinion, on the material advantage of a practical command of languages, and so have no message for those of us who are intent on education in the true meaning of the term. It is little short of amazing, too, that there is no specific reference to conditions in modern language teaching in public schools or the older Univer- sities. At Oxford, for instance, although the current attitude of naiad towards modern languages is still deplor- able, there arc now several substantial benefactions for travelling scholarships and Fellowships, which intake it possible for the student of modern languages—and, indeed, the student of history or other modern studies—to equip himself for the higher branches of commerce in a way that was never thought of before the War.
Certainly Sir Francis Goodenough and his colleagues record the absence in foreign schools of any dead-weight of tradition, such as still to-day makes modern languages in this country, to a great extent, the Cinderella of the curriculum. The classical tradition here continues to act as a serious bar. Schools and parents in this country arc still wedded to the idea that first-rate teaching in Latin and Greek is the best means of sharpening a boy's wits and training his mind so that it becomes a polished instrument capable of tackling any subject which he may be called upon to study in after life. At the Univer- sity the classical scholar is still the most favoured. Ile acquires a capacity for writing polished prose or turning graceful verses in Greek or Latin, adding to this a sound knowledge of ancient history and ancient philosophy, and then is turned out a finished product, a gentleman and a man of letters. That is the theory. But in the world of 1930, as we know, this product does not easily find its appropriate niche.
Other things being equal—that is to say with a guarantee of similar first-rate teaching and opportunities for travelling abroad—we are convinced that the study of living modern languages and an appreciation of modern civilization, has at least as great educative value as the intensive—and often exclusive—cultivation of the classics. There is no more important lesson to be learnt by us in this country than the value of the modern humanities.
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