Mary Grabar writes in Pajamas Media about the place for foreign languages in the United States. There is a difference in being required to learn a foreign language and the choice to learn a language to expand your learning experience and depth.

Obama’s Language Mandate: Why It Feels Like Hungarian to Me

August 3, 2008 – by Mary Grabar

excerpts

“Obama’s call to teach children Spanish, therefore, reveals not an enlightened appreciation of another culture, but a quotidian concern with basic communication, furthermore communication with immigrants who today are most often illiterate or semiliterate. Obama is not imploring us to learn Spanish in order to read and discuss the works of Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Cervantes, but to be able to fill out welfare forms, give orders to construction workers, and to unionize chicken pluckers.”

“Obama, the Harvard-educated lawyer, betrays his own leftist objectives and profound lack of intellectualism. Like his radical friend, education professor and leader of the former Weathermen Bill Ayers, he does not value learning for its own sake, but sees it as a political tool, another way to use education to advance social goals. Obama’s view of foreign language acquisition is the opposite of the one of conservative parents and professors who have advocated foreign language study for the benefit of the student’s intellectual advancement. Obama, the dour schoolmaster, tells us we “must” learn the language of the border-hoppers who have invaded our country. I think I know what it felt like when my aunt was forced to learn Hungarian.”