By Jill Cornish, Ph.D. | Senior Lecturer in French
Reading a recent column in the Baylor Lariat, I recalled every conversation I’ve ever had with a student over the years who wondered why they have to take language courses.
Broadly, language teachers have been working to justify our profession and its importance to American students for decades. Since GoogleTranslate officially launched almost exactly 20 years ago, we have faced the same obstacles which all amount to the same question: why do we need to learn languages if computers can do it for us?
Basically, all the reasons I’ve come to over the years can be distilled down into the same answer: language learning has a positive impact on humans. Languages activate parts of our brain that aid in critical thinking, broaden our thought patterns, build sympathy and empathy. They push us outside our comfort zones and bring the world to us.
Put another way, language learning can be a crucial part of human flourishing.
As a Christian university, Baylor’s mission is “to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community”, upheld by our recently-added Pro mundo stance to the motto. Languages are part of that well-rounded education, one which enables students access to fields of study that are good for their humanity and promote community.
I’m reminded of the moment at Pentecost in Acts where the Holy Spirit breathes tongues of fire on the disciples who are then able, by his power, to speak all the languages of the people represented at the gathering. In that pivotal moment of the New Testament, languages are reinforced as a gift from God. Not that he gifted everyone the same language to return to the Tower of Babel builders, but rather that the gift was of multiple languages, provided to communicate with everyone there, no matter their backgrounds, keeping intact the gift of the creation of languages established in Genesis 11.
A main point of the Lariat piece that stands out is the idea that students should be able to pursue their studies “in a more productive way” because it’s “tailored around their own passions and goals.” Higher education in the U.S. has become ever-more-transactional in that students expect their education to be entirely customizable to their needs and what is relevant to them.
I would like to say something that might spark frustration: I don’t believe your education is entirely about you.
Whether you are studying accounting or agriculture, chemistry or communications, political science or Portuguese, a Baylor education is about service to others. Without a doubt, your professors believe in the importance of their own fields, but most of us also believe in the importance of studying everything else taught on this campus.
Everything is connected, if we are able to push ourselves to think critically about those connections. You may not think my French class is relevant to your degree program in accounting, but I guarantee that the “soft skills” (as the humanities is forced to market them now to justify our professions) you learn in my class will transfer to everything else you do beyond Baylor.
As I sit in the library at a writing group for faculty from fields all across campus, I am reminded of the importance of all my colleagues’ areas of research and study. We believe our students can benefit from what we have to offer them, even if it’s not exactly what they thought they wanted to study.
For my department specifically, language learning, in its purest form, is a way to love our neighbors because we are putting ourselves in their shoes and working to understand them on a deeper level. Even just a semester or two of a language provides students with the opportunity to develop listening and communication skills that transfer to any other field.
Even when knowledge of the language itself fades, those critical thinking skills — and the relationships you formed with professors, colleagues and language speakers — remain.
