In order for us, students of any age, to find and keep the energy we need to stay at our task, we must know the purpose we are working for. This is decidedly true in the study of language, whether we are learning a new one or learning again the rules and graces of our own native speech. For us in the contemporary world, language study is now almost entirely instrumental; we’re inclined to take the trouble if we can see the skill it will give us in the real (read economic) world, but who really has the time or inclination to study a language for the intellectual life it opens on to? Let’s be realistic, after all.
It might be time, though, to be a bit more idealistic. We should be skilled, of course, in whatever we wish to do well (and if we don’t wish to do it well, we shouldn’t be doing it at all). But a skill is properly applied to a well-defined and therefore limited activity. We might choose to learn to cook to be able to prepare a tastier meal, or we might study marketing to launch a new online store. The study of language, too, will produce a skill, but it can and should and will do much more than that. That more, however, is not actionable, unless we include—and traditional cultures did—those intellectual practices which lead to some fundamental understanding about the way things are, to a comprehension of the larger questions which concern us, to what, in the end, is properly termed insight, wisdom.
But do we even use the word wisdom credibly anymore? It derives from an Old English verb meaning to know (and still further back from a Latin verb meaning to see), but we call wise someone who knows not just how to accomplish a specific task, but who sees both the cause and consequence of a condition or action. Wisdom implies a moral quality, which skill does not. To possess such insight (again the idea of seeing) and to have it at hand when it is called upon requires perspective, a triangulation of sorts in which we use a third point to find our bearings and discern how to proceed. Regarded from this higher, humanistic point of view, the study of language, which would now be properly called philology (an almost obsolete term now meaning the love of language and literature), would confront us with the possibility, indeed the adventure, of understanding the whys and wherefores of our thinking, and from there guide us into the reaches of what may exceed the material world we are so familiar with, that world which Wordsworth said was too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
To believe such things, we must be more than practical: we must turn unabashedly toward the ideal. We must be prepared to work out the implications of grand words like education and democracy and citizenship, and understand them to mean more than a sentimentalized hope. We can often find the perspective we need to revivify fundamental ideas by triangulating historically, so to speak, in order to see what others thought of the same grand ideas we may be hesitant to speak too loudly about in the practical world of getting and spending. Some do, though, have the resoluteness required. Here, for example, are the opening two sentences of an article entitled “The Importance of Foreign Language Study in the General Scheme of American Education,” by the University of Wisconsin linguist Charles Purin. It appeared in The Modern Language Journal over a century ago, in 1920:
Ever since the birth of institutions of learning the study of foreign languages has always held an important place in the general educational scheme of all civilized nations of the globe. To eliminate this important discipline from the curricula of our schools in order to make room for some of the so-called “practical” disciplines—a demand which has been seriously raised here and there—would mean to slight deliberately the best interests of the commonwealth by weakening the fabric both of education and of citizenship.
Purin goes on to assert (in some beautifully drawn phrases) that “a conscious and discriminating attitude towards language cannot be developed through work exclusively in the vernacular,” and that is the case, he says, for both cognitive and cultural reasons: we use our own language naturally and unconsciously, and so have not developed the “close and orderly thinking” we accrue in studying a foreign language, and we insularize ourselves, risking our right and natural human sympathy with other human beings from other unfamiliar places. Purin continues:
The greatest value of the study of a foreign language lies, accordingly, in its humanizing effect. It is the only road to the intellectual and soul life of ancient or modern people. It confers a citizenship with the world and a citizenship with the ages. It makes the individual a conscious part of the great human unity.
The great human unity. Unabashedly ideal, certainly, and it may just be that the close and deliberate study of language—whether another culture’s or our own again—can direct us away from the edge of things at which we find ourselves in the present, tough-minded historical moment. For whether something is practical or ideal depends upon what we believe is in the very nature of things possible. And this is a fruitful philosophical question to ponder with the material help of a language we wield confidently—aspiring even to execute masterfully—through difficult but rewarding intellectual lands. Why, after all, should we wish for less than it is our birthright to possess?
***