Mr. Robert J. Hall, JR.'S observations, published under the title, "Progress and Reaction in Modern Language Teaching," in the Summer 1945 issue of the A.A.U.P. Bulletin are a belated post mortem of the defunct and buried A.S.T.P. program, and would not call for any remarks on the part of well-informed teachers and linguists, were it not for the fact that the Bulletin, by printing them, gave them a prominence which might be misinterpreted by the uninitiated.

Modern and other language teachers in this country have not labored for sixty years to give the profession a certain dignity, to be now urged to seek models for teaching cultural backgrounds, especially as regards the Mediterranean civilization, in Bantu, Tagalog, Menominee, Navajo, Eskimo and Chibcha linguistics, taught in Pidgin or Basic English. It may be that in music, singing, and dancing the prevailing trends hark back to the jungle (jangal = forest primeval), Mickey Mouse, and Jos6 Carioca, but unless the whole of the United States is to be transformed into a phonematic Hollywood scenario, no serious language teacher will even try to excavate the antediluvian tablets on which the notes of the A.S.T.P. rumba were written.