My aging grandfather: veteran of WWII, electrician, former legislator of his town, and previously incomparable story teller.
The full text of the article can be foundhere, but the full commentary by yours truly can be found below.
This particular report is of specific interest to those like myself and others steadily at war with a creeping monster relentlessly availing itself of increasingly larger parts of a loved one’s mental faculties and neither returning them, nor exchanging them, in the end, for something of equal or greater value. Inasmuch as this is a blog related to teaching, and most specifically language teaching, the TIME article, is both timely (tra-la!) and purposeful, as it relates to two separate growing populations in our country: alzheimers sufferers, and the numbers that would be legion of those entirely bereft of language skills as a result of decades of focus on skills that qualify soundly as other than bilingualism.
During the previous administration, a poignant commentary was published proclaiming the country’s disturbing, and consequently dangerous dearth of dedicated decoders of delicate documents related to national security. A wide reaching call was put out to recruit, retain, and retrain as many language specialists as possible in the interest of creating a core of trustworthy translators whose job it would be to relay sensitive intelligence to the proper authorities relating to the ‘war on terror’. This call, however, was poorly heeded, and the reality of the situation is that intelligence specialists actually enticed D.C. cab drivers known to speak Kurdish, or Urdu, or Farsi to come and work in the community doing translation. Despite these glaring discrepancies between our need and our available resources, our national security versus our linguistic capability, few people managed to comprehend the scope of the problem. It is also crucial at this moment to highlight the simple fact that, of the G20, we are the only one that does not require its students to be bilingual – at the very least – before they graduate from high school. All of those problems are clearly the result of a belief in the phenomenology produced by what at one point in history was known as the almighty dollar. But, as my Aikido teacher astutely lectured us, on repeated occasions: “the inherent phallacy of all humankind is that I’m in here, and you’re out there.” If President Obama is to be believed, as well as the rank and file of current economists, our livelihood, our continued existence on this planet, and to echo the words of many a general, federal agent, and boots on the ground soldier, our all too precious safety inside our country depends on our ability to not only militarily defend ourselves, but to comprehend our neighbors, our enemies, their cultures, and their ideas. That, ladies and gentlemen, cannot be done without language.
So, how is the politicization of this blog post justified? Easily, my friends, because of the following: education, much like art (and I think as I’ve illustrated in my previous posts), is always political. Just take a look at what’s happening in Albany with mayoral control of the schools, for starters. But, that’s not the topic of this post. The topic of this post is people like my grandfather, his niece who lives with her husband across the street and is now suffering the same problem, his older sister that lives in the same house she’s been in for the past 60 years (or so). One of the most salient statements that deserves baring out is that individuals that developed language skills early on were less likely to develop symptoms of dementia – i.e. memory loss, disassociative disorders, etc. – despite the fact that they may have developed plaques, jumbled neurons, and hosts of other biological indicators that would lead researchers, physicians and caregivers to expect to find symptoms of dementia in the patient. Nuns – because the subjects of this long range study were nuns – are frequently known to study not only English, but also Latin in order to comprehend the early versions of holy texts, some may also study Greek, and a variety of Romance languages in order to comprehend commentaries known to have been written by saintly figures throughout the history of the Christian religion. All of that said, these nuns have been tracked through time for the past 60 years, which would make the initial contact with them somewhere near their 20’s. Logic then dictates that, since they must’ve already taken their vows by that time, they must have already studied the languages indicated above beforehand. To be clear, their language learning had most assuredly fallen under the umbrella of ‘early in life’.
The final purpose of this post is this: that foreign language class you’re taking – Spanish, French, German, Italian, Arabic, Swahili, Nahuatl, Pashtu, Urdu, Hindi, Mandarin, Quiche, whatever it is, pay attention! Your entire country is counting on you to come out on the other side with the ability to speak, read, write, and understand spoken and written words in a foreign language. Likewise, you’ll be able to battle both senility and the economic downturn in one fell swoop of your pen. So, if you’re interested in a few career paths that require language skills that are all starving for people right now, get in touch, I know in which direction to point you.
