Teaching Foreign Languages in Schools
For anyone who has learned a number of languages and has studied different cultures of their users one important matter seems to emerge. In their environments and through the events that form their history, human beings have attempted to objectify a conscious or unconscious collective aim and have submitted their minds, their passions, and their visions to the effects of a larger molding force. Peoples have learned to adhere, through their education, to most of the implicit or explicit aims of their society. One of the tools for such education is the assimilation of the mother tongue. Languages are excellent witnesses of various modes of thought. The spirit of each language seems to act as a container for the melody and the structure of the language and most users are unconscious of it. Words may be dropped or have their meaning changed, but it does not seem thinkable that the English or the Germans will ever agree to change the way in which they form the future of their verbs and adopt the one used by the Latin countries — or conversely. Expressions that are more telling in one language than in another may be adopted by writers in their work, but the number of these expressions must remain small lest communication with those who do not know them is endangered. Because we find simultaneously a vein that is maintained in the history of a language and also some alterations taking place in it, we can trace in any human group an adherence to traditions of language as well as the will to adapt expression to circumstances.
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