Here is what John McWorther writes in New Republic, Feel free to comment below."A somewhat surprising piece in The New York Times this week reported that the French dual-language program in New York's public school system "is booming," the third-largest such program in the city, after Spanish and Chinese. That commitment is a beautiful thing—for children of Francophone immigrants. But for we natives, the idea that kids need to pick up French is now antique." Continue this article on:
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Wed, 12 Feb 2014
Mr. McWhorter’s article projects a need for “survival-skill” level of language acquisition based on a demographic consideration of immigrational demands for basic communicational skills. His mind-set, while making minimally nominal references to French culture, rejects the other apparent benefits implicit in the study of French (or any other language, for that matter).
He has apparently relegated the expansion of one’s mind by the study of works by great French and Francophone thinkers (i.e., authors, philosophers, scientists, teachers, etc.) to a level of an unnecessary exercise. We must eventually conclude from this approach that one should learn to utter words but that the utterance of these words does not require any thought. We reach the point that any thought process is unnecessary as well. We might, just as well, return to a previous state of our evolution: the grunting age.
La traduction francaise de cet article dans Courrier International me laisse encore plus pantois
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