Foreign Studies (1969)

Foreign Studies was written by Richard C. Lyon in June 1969.

The study of foreign languages in American colleges and universities is apt to be an experience of forced feeding. The student is asked to submit with more or less discomfort to a four-semester dose of drills and exercises said to bring cultural benefits which are never quite made clear to him. Too often he remains restive and unconvinced, and soon forgets what little he had had to learn in the process of meeting the catalog requirements.

A part of the trouble lies in our failure to introduce the student to language study in and through his active concerns. His teachers should seek ways of making it clear that knowledge of a given language may open to him stores of information and insight about the matters that touch him nearly. The philosophy student challenged to discover Unamuno in the original, the student of film led to study of Italian through his interest in Italian films, the student of international monetary reform introduced to French in the course of pursuing the theories of Jacques Rueff: these connectings of ongoing curiosity with language study are sometimes made, but could and should be made far more often than they are through the guidance of faculty alive to the international dimensions of their studies. Foreign languages will be regarded at Hampshire College as tools useful for the study of any subject, and as tools indespensable for the study of many subjects when explored deeply. (p.5-6)

...Students who take a language on compulsion and without aptitude gain too little from the experience to justify what it costs them and the college. Hampshire College will not, accordingly, make the demonstration of competence in a foreign language a requirement for graduation; the study of a language will be entirely at the option of the student. The entering Hampshire student will normally have had three years of instruction in a foreign language in high school or preparatory school, and it is our belief that increasing numbers of internationally minded students will, without our insistence, want to continue to study a language as a means of escaping the provincial or widening their comprehension of the world. (p.7-8)

One of the prominent features of the Hampshire academic program is its intention to offer intensive language training in special summer programs on the Hampshire campus. These will be designed to serve Hampshire's own students, those who may be interested from the other four institutions, and students from elsewhere (ranging in age from their early teens or younger to late adulthood, and including independent students as well as those who may be enrolled in regular institutions). (p.9)

Hampshire College intends to have the most modern and well-equipped language laboratory it can develop, for use during the regular academic year as well as in summer. The electronic systems and instructional materials will be expressly designed to foster self-teaching. It may in time be possible to make available to students self-instructional materials in exotic languages such as Chinese and Arabic; experiments at several Midwest colleges have proven the feasibility of such arrangements. (p.12-13)

Hampshire College is convinced of the great value to the college student of time spent in other countries. Language learning as well as understanding of alien peoples usually proceeds abroad at a pace that cannot be equalled by classroom or laboratory study or through time spent with tutors...Those with high-level proficiency achieved through Hampshire's intensive-training programs will be encouraged to spend a year abroad, in a foreign university or in work with a government or business agency. Every effort will be made to assist such students in the procurement of fellowships or scholarships for overseas study. (p.13-14)