Posted on 01/28/2008 8:58:11 AM PST by bs9021
Global Linguistic Citizenship for All
by: Bethany Stotts, January 28, 2008
..... According to the DOD 2005 “Defense Language Transformation Roadmap,” “Language skill and regional expertise have not been regarded as war-fighting skills, and are not sufficiently incorporated into operational or contingency planning... Language skill and regional expertise are not valued as Defense core competencies yet they are as important as critical weapon systems.”
Professor Scott Wible, an English professor at West Virginia University, criticized the DoD for its use of militaristic analogies when referring to the vital role language proficiency plays in promoting national security. “Such ideas send a message that we use these foreign languages to wage war; we speak them as means to know our enemies and to eliminate them,” he told a Modern Language Association (MLA) audience this December...
The MLA continues to push for greater “translingual and transcultural competence” among college students, which it believes will enhance not only students’ language skills, but their capacity for global citizenship... “Our whole culture,” they quote Yankelovich as saying, “must become less ethnocentric, less patronizing, less ignorant of others, less Manichaean in judging other cultures, and more at home with the rest of the world....
MLA leaders seem similarly inclined toward such a gesture, especially since their proposed language reform would elevate the importance of literary and interdisciplinary studies during early college-level language education, providing an integrated approach with a “broader and more coherent curriculum in which language, culture, and literature are taught as a continuous whole.” ....In other words, students would learn foreign languages in tandem with gender studies, queer theory, race theory, marxist values, and other politicized forms of literary criticism.....
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
MLA leaders seem similarly inclined toward such a gesture, especially since their proposed language reform would elevate the importance of literary and interdisciplinary studies during early college-level language education, providing an integrated approach with a “broader and more coherent curriculum in which language, culture, and literature are taught as a continuous whole.” ....In other words, students would learn foreign languages in tandem with gender studies, queer theory, race theory, marxist values, and other politicized forms of literary criticism.....
He's an English professor. That sounds rather ethnocentric to me.
Dont know about this particular person, however.
He doesn't like it that someone at the Pentagon is doing their job.
We need names and pictures of everyone who applauded. They are not friends to America.
VIVA ESPERANTO!
I heard the complaint from someone in intelligence in Central Command who had spent a lot of time in the field. His proposed solution was that everyone in the military academies along with everyone in ROTC be required to take foreign languages with the intent of speaking, reading and writing it well (as opposed to foreign language literature degrees). That language would be assigned to the students the based on military needs. Thus lots of 2nd lieutenants and ensigns would have a good working knowledge of Arabic, Urdu and Chinese rather than German and Spanish.
“The MLA continues to push for greater “translingual and transcultural competence” among college students, which it believes will enhance not only students’ language skills, but their capacity for global citizenship... “Our whole culture,” they quote Yankelovich as saying, “must become less ethnocentric, less patronizing, less ignorant of others, less Manichaean in judging other cultures, and more at home with the rest of the world....”
Expert use of lying, of hiding a lie.
What is really said, in that statement, is that the people of the successful cultures, the achieving cultures should diminish the importance of that from which they have drawn their success and lift up the failing cultures of the world.
Yea right - like the everlasting cultures of tribal rivalry in Africa, or the Islamic-Caliphate culture of increasing numbers of Muslims, majorities of whom are vastly under-educated.
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