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Toward a Place for Study in a World of Instruction
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Robbie McClintock
Institute for Learning Technologies
Teachers College — Columbia University
December 2000
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Section 9 — Language Study with Television
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¶ 83
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I wonder if cable television could be used to facilitate people's
independent study of languages and foreign cultures. The available
means of studying languages have been deeply influenced by the
vogue of instruction. Hence, a program such as Guten Tag on NET consists essentially of televised
teaching, with some movies added to display the language in
operation, allowing the learner to enter vicariously the world
of German. Such movies are expensive to produce, and the whole
system has one major drawback, the rigidity of the schedule
of lessons. Should one miss a few installments, it becomes difficult
to catch up; thus televised instruction becomes as lock-step
as classroom teaching, and a major potential advantage of educational
television is lost. Such programs are not the only possibility,
however, which will become quite clear if we can reassure ourselves
that to learn a language one need not receive instruction.
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¶ 84
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Recall, for instance, the famous story of how as a child Montaigne
learned his Latin. Here, Montaigne's advantages stood him in
good stead. When he was still an infant, his father hired a
young German scholar to live with the family and to have the
child accompany him continually. As the scholar went about his
business, he addressed his infantile companion only in excellent
Latin. Mother and father boned up on it too so that in their
son's presence they also spoke only Latin, albeit less elegantly.
The servants soon learned to bid young Montaigne's childish
will according to Latin commands, and the local dialect even
took on a number of Latin words from this curious child who
spoke no French. Learned doctors would hesitate to converse
with the boy of five for fear of having the flaws in their Latin
shown up, and it was not until he went to college that Montaigne
learned French and found his Latin becoming corrupt. [ 69
]
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¶ 85
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Such learning through immersion, which was then a possibility
only for the very rich, is fast becoming technically possible
for all. Out of the fifty or sixty channels that cable TV can
soon be offering, it would not be extravagant to have half a
dozen or so broadcasting continuously in foreign languages,
and should the system ever reach 300 channels as it perhaps
can, it could easily carry continuous programming in all the
major languages. Furthermore, the production costs of such broadcasts
could be very low, much below those for producing special language
courses, if a system could be arranged by which the major cultural
networks of the world would exchange, without charges, daily
tapes of all their regular programming. If this were done, besides
broadcasting its own programming on its regular channel, NET
could also broadcast daily on subsidiary channels the programming
of its equivalent in French, German, Russian, Latin American
Spanish, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, Hindi, Japanese,
and so on. In view of the popularity of tourism and the widely
diffused curiosity about other parts of the world, the potential
audience for such programming might be surprisingly large, especially
after a period of time when people had had a chance to become
accustomed to its availability. Arranging such exchanges might
be an excellent project for UNESCO, and should the exchanges
get under way, they would be a great addition to the opportunities
of study open to every man and they would greatly boost our
cosmopolitan sensibilities.
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¶ 86
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Pedagogically, the system might revolutionize language study.
For most, learning languages is impossibly academic because
the opportunities to participate in the system of experience
that a language defines are hard to come by. To be sure, one
can subscribe to Die Welt or L'Express, cultivate
foreign flicks, and devote one's vacations to the picturesque
sights of far-off lands. But these are insufficient in themselves,
and they present barriers to the many who have not received
rather advanced instruction in the languages in question. In
contrast, with daily access to television programming produced
for German audiences and a good self-study book like Harry Steinhauer's
Read, Write, Speak German, any man with a bit of perseverance
could not only learn the language, but enter enjoyably the German
sphere of experience. [ 70 ] In this way,
such programming that catered to independent study would be
much more than a simple set of language courses; it would evoke
an understanding of the genius of different peoples that would
far excel the fondest dreams of those who want to teach world
understanding through the schools. If people are to understand
one another, they need opportunities to experience one another,
and such a system of multi-language television programming,
plus the great opportunities that many have today for travel,
would be a good way to provide for such mutual experience.
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¶ 87
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I wonder as well about things less programmatic. I wonder
if study could be subtly brought to the fore in many further
ways, in schools of education, law, and medicine; in the press
and entertainment; in museums, exhibitions, and libraries; in
scientific laboratories and experimental stations; in politics,
business, and labor. I wonder if we can resist consecrating
our culture, preserving it for study rather than worship; I
wonder whether we can refuse to transform those simple works,
which men have made for men, into miraculous, wonder-working
relics that the credulous suppliant approaches on battered knees,
hoping that with incomprehending obeisance some good will be
wrought on his spirit. Such misplaced reverence simply invites
the cynic to exploit art for base purposes of commerce and politics.
But then, at least the cynic insists that art have a human function;
perhaps that function could be more liberating if, instead of
teaching children and adults the reasons a critic adduces for
believing a work to be great, the teacher would simply let people
study how the work can help them find their own greatness, their
ability to become what they are.
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¶ 88
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I wonder quirky things, too; I wonder whether the somber tone
of the obituary page in the daily paper might somehow change
from a notice of death to a celebration of life; I wonder whether
it could become the part of the paper most interesting to the
young, for there, day by day, they could glimpse something about
the diverse and fascinating courses that human life can take.
I wonder also whether introductions to literature might not
junk their outworn national frames, substituting for the American
novel, for the English novel, and others, a study of something
more pertinent to the awakening adolescent, the Bildungsroman and its antitype, the novel of stifled
aspirations. [ 71 ] I wonder, further, whether
historians and literary critics might pay more attention to
the intellectual and characterological development of significant
men, laying bare for others the rationalities and irrationalities
that an interesting man, un esprit fort, combines in
making himself. [ 72 ] Lastly, I wonder whether
philosophers of education might not mute their interest in the
rationale of instruction and return to the question that Plato
had Socrates put in the Protagoras: what is likely
to happen to the character of a student who assents to follow
one or another type of teacher? [ 73 ]
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¶ 89
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But enough of wonder! All these and any other speculations
that one might spawn will prove mere daydreams unless efforts
to implement new hopes can gain energy by working in sympathy
with powerful historic forces. Ideas give the flux form, but
they do not put the flux itself in motion and they do not determine
its basic direction of movement. The powerful historic motions
of our recent past, the rise of the industrial nation-states,
were given pedagogical form by the Comenian vision of compulsory
education through authoritative instruction, and if these motions
are going to remain the dominant movements in history, no alternative
vision is likely to form the flux, no matter how much some might
wish that it would. This is not to say that the basic vectors
of development determine all of history; but they do distinguish,
generally, very broadly, between impossibilities and possibilities.
The latter, the possibilities, are always ample enough for the
future to be highly uncertain and exciting; and it is with respect
to these that the particular, personal choices by various men
inspired by diverse ideas play their essential part in determining
historic actuality. What, if any, real, tangible, fundamental
developments in the vast historic flux might be incongruent
with the compulsory instructional forms characteristic of our
recent past? What ineluctable movements may be conducive to
some pattern of comprehensive, voluntary study?
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Endnotes
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| Note 69 |
See Montaigne, "Of the Education of Children," Selected Essays, op.cit., n.2, pp. 48-50. [Back] |
| Note 70 |
See Harry Steinhauer. Read, Write, Speak German. New York: Bantam Books,
1965. It is important to note that in substance and format a
work such as this, intelligently designed for self-study, reverts
in many of its features to the style of old-time grammars, especially
in that it minimizes explanation and emphasizes exercises. [Back] |
| Note 71 |
It is my hope to offer a seminar sometime on the pedagogy
of the Bildungsroman, which has been strangely ignored
by American students of education even though much American
literature falls within the genre. For a good discussion of
the antitype of the Bildungsroman, see F. W. Dupree, "Flaubert and the
Sentimental Education," The New York Review of Books, Vol. XVI, No. 7, April
22, 197 1, pp. 42-5 1. [Back] |
| Note 72 |
Educational historians might do much more in the way of studying
the intellectual growth of important figures as Dominique Arban
has done for Dostoevsky in Les Années d'apprentissage de Fiodor
Dostoieviki. Paris: Payot, 1968; and Virgil K. Whitaker has
done for Shakespeare in Shakespeare's Use of Learning: An Inquiry into the Growth
of His Mind and Art. San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington
Library, 1964. [Back] |
| Note 73 |
Plato. Protagoras, 318a. [Back] |
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