Killing Living Languages

Disastrous, deceitful, diabolical, crazy.

So runs the litany of epithets that have greeted the French government's latest stab at educational reform. The reform frees lycee (secondary school) students, who take their first modern foreign language at the age of eleven, from the obligation of starting a second language when they are 13. The government's intention was benign: to lighten what Paris pedagogues have come to view as an excessively heavy academic burden. Instead, the idea has stirred up fierce opposition.

Fearful of losing their jobs, France's foreign-language teachers recently staged brief strikes; worried about future jobs, language students rioted. Both received strong support from an unexpected quarter: the governments of Italy, Spain and West Germany, which have all complained bitterly to French authorities.

If French schoolchildren are not forced to take a second language, critics say, at least half of them will drop such courses. Since more than 80% of France's lycee students choose English as their first foreign language, critics also worry that English will eventually gain an absolute monopoly--and not only in France.

"If we are satisfied with just knowing English," argued the conservative newspaper L'Aurore, "why shouldn't other countries be too?" In this view, the new policy may finish off French as the international language of diplomacy, elegance and love. If the French learn only English, their neighbors in Italy, Germany and Spain may very well quit learning French in favor of English.

The notion is not as farfetched as it sounds. Officials at the Foreign Affairs Ministry in Rome have already pointed out that the reform contradicts the spirit of the existing French-Italian cultural accord, which encourages each country to increase the use of the other country's language. Since this agreement was based on linguistic reciprocity, Rome has hinted, perhaps French might cease to be the leading foreign language in Italian schools.

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