Ken Robinson
Posts Tagged: education
16
May 10
Linguistic Isolationism (in the UK)
I finally found a possible counter argument to all my complaints of the Grand Valley modern languages department:
Put it this way: how would you react if you met somebody from the Continent claiming to hold an English degree who had never heard of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens or T.S. Eliot? Such have been the changes in our modern language degrees that we are producing a generation of linguists who often have little acquaintance with the major cultural achievements of the target language. The decision not to insist that all students of German, for instance, read at least some work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Thomas Mann has consequences.Maybe the university system is to blame: a professor is someone who has a Ph.D in the subject, nowhere do you hear about people having to pass a training program for teaching well or holding MAs in Applied Linguistics for that matter. Universities do a good job of imparting the culture and some more of the gritty language details (I loved learning about phonetics and linguistics, etc) but I still believe, if you want to learn a language you best place is to start in grade school (you know, the place where the people working there have been trained for such a job) and take private classes while living in a foreign country, if possible.
I’m trying to keep this gripe a short a post. I leave you with the link to this article I quoted. Good stuff: