I cannot imagine a more discouraging suggestion for our future than the fear cited by Louise Matsakis in an Atlantic article last week entitled ‘The End of Foreign-Language Education’. Actions create consequences and this would be bad for Americans for multiple reasons.
Matsakis’s fear—and she certainly raises a timely point—is that AI will replace languages in people’s minds, thus discouraging attention to them. I wrote as the academic year 2023-24 began that the state university in Morgantown, West Virginia, announced it would curtail offering world languages, a proposition I found short-sighted and shocking. The University of Kansas, after closing its school of languages in 2020, announced during the pandemic that it was eliminating degree programs in several fields, including a couple of languages. A cursory look at their website indicates that both East Asian and African/African diaspora languages and culture still offer minors with some graduate work but the traditional western European fields of French, Spanish, German or Portuguese disappeared as far as I can tell. Persian and Slavic languages do offer concentrations.
I am not picking on these two schools but their choices both attracted press coverage and outrage over the past five years for budget-driven choices. Matsakis’s piece is a more fundamental one: AI’s use may supercede people knowing how to speak another language. Since we are all, on some level, pretty lazy folks, this will deter the interest which then leads to a shortage of faculty at any and all levels of education, closure of programs, and even less understanding of other cultures, peoples, and differences. It’s a breathtaking mistake.
I fully understand that we respond to incentives much as my cats respond to their breakfasts and midrats. Jobs today don’t appear to benefit from languages and hey, the AI systems can do them. Right?
Languages are a most basic manifestation of any and every society. Languages tell us specifics and generalities about others and ourselves. They open the door to grasping religious applications, nuances of history, and the most minute of differences in speech can make a world of distinction in interpretation of a seemingly common idea. Languages are how we communicate with the intention each of us brings, all eight billion of us. And the list goes on.
Artificial intelligence simply cannot substitute for that. I am making a blanket statement that will not change over time: the intricacy, flexibility, agility, and any other ‘-ility’ I can think of is inate in the human mind with its processing because of the variables that humans inject in thought, conversation, and understanding the past. The mechanical—and computers remain mechanical (despite Hal in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey)—processing cannot introduce sufficient nuances to replicate the mind.
I realise I am a troglodyte on this issue. But Americans, like our British ‘cousins’, already suffer from thinking the world should just become more like us. We all laugh nervously at that old joke about Americans speaking to a foreigner by simply talking in English far more loudly as if they cannot hear us but truth is that we think ours is the only way. We forget that 96%—ninety-six of every 100—people on the planet are not Yanks and many don’t want to be like us for a raft of reasons. We don’t want to abandon our measurement system, even though it costs us billions annually to be virtually the sole users of inches and feet rather than metric. We want to keep everyone speaking English, though we are perfectly happy to learn enough Spanish to become the jefes for the millions of labourers who have no schools where they can learn English as they are working (legal or not) in agriculture, construction, or food service in this country. We think that if we hold on to our views long enough, people will come around.
Not so much because the rest of the world tends to think we can’t or won’t learn about them so others learn languages often out of self-defense.
Thank goodness the Chinese similarly are as self-absorbed as it means they discount human thinking to discover the value of understanding that cultures operate with vastly different objectives, tolerances, and other applications. Americans love to accuse the Chinese of being self-centric yet a most fine linguist friend has been telling me for a quarter century that the PRC sees language as the first barrier to outsiders interceding and threatening the Middle Kingdom. That was the view when Lord McCartney arrived in 1794 and it’s still pretty similar today, though thousands of Mandarin-speakers learn Walter Chronkite English only to find that insufficient jobs exist because Xi Jinping doesn’t want citizens influenced by outside dangerous forces.
Languages are not a replacement for solid analysis of any and all problems. I had an exchange about three hours ago with one of my former Cornell students who grew up in what I expect was a Spanish-speaking home near Los Angeles (why do I suspect that? He still uses the Á rather than A to spell his surname), then studied Mandarin for many years. His Chinese is impeccable yet he decided to divert into studying Burmese and Thai out of interest and conviction about the future. We were discussing his impending graduate program. I encouraged him to focus not merely on the substance of Myanmar and Thailand but the process of studying various topics. I pointed out that it’s too easy to get caught by changes while he already recognised it’s easy to become ensnared in academic infighting. The bottom line is that we are too infrequently willing to accept that thinking is a dying art in our society. I fear that AI makes that all the more likely.
In a world of infinitely greater complexity, whether it’s machines, machine-learning, technical thinking, math, science or literature that tells us much about the Urdu-speakers of South Asia, we need have a broader rather than a more narrow appreciation of the range of topics.
I am not saying it’s a binary choice, in other words. It’s not learn a language or learn nuclear physics; it is at least sampling, or being cognizant of, the entire array of aspects of human behaviour. The more you can squeeze in, the better. It’s being open to the inquiry and thought processes of learning rather than assuming that by figuring out a single vector or field, you are done. As I noted in last week’s confessional, I made that mistake and still pay for it in my poor ability in so many technical fields.
Yes, we live in a highly demanding world with constant innovation and discovery but without being open to the range of learning processes, we risk losing the advancements out of thinking we have no need. And many of those will be colloborative efforts from overseas where it would be helpful to have some better understanding.
I hope people won’t decide to forego languages but you may think otherwise. I welcome your reactions to this possibility. I also welcome your rebuttals and thoughts. Please circulate this if you find it of value. I appreciate your time and especially those of you who support this column financially. You are my heroines and heroes every day.
We have had yet another day of heavy rain. Imagine our shock when we looked up to see this beauty had graced the bouy outside our condo as we were sitting this afternoon. Yoo hoo. Spring is coming!
Be well and be safe. FIN
Jennifer Kingson, ‘West Virginia’s foreign language cuts could be “blue print” for high ed attacks’, axios.com, 3 September 2023, retrieved at https://www.axios.com/2023/08/30/west-virginia-university-foreign-language-classes
Louise Matsakis, ‘The End of foreign Language Education‘, theatlantic.com, 26 March 2024, retrieved at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/generative-ai-translation-education/677883/
University of Kansas, ‘Fields of Study’, retrieved at https://ku.edu/fields-of-study