It is difficult for me to express in so many words what I feel as I am standing here before this august body of scholars and teachers to address you as your president—in this particular year 1961. It is not only the honor as such that is crushing, an honor which in all humility I accepted for the greater glory of my beloved University rather than as a nod to my own modest talents. No, what is really crushing is to be called upon to address you at this particular juncture of world events, described in the words of President Kennedy as “the most dangerous time in the history of the human race,” in the eery light of the fact that “the events and decisions of the next ten months may well decide the fate of man for the next 10,000 years.” Even one year ago, nobody would have prognosticated in such terms. The German problem, the causa movens of it all, has been with us, and with this society of American humanists, for quite some time. In 1917, it was the noble lot of Kuno Francke to strike the balance of cultural values, and, in 1941, John Walz had a similar task, of incomparably greater magnitude. In 1957, when by H. Carrington Lancaster's presidential forecast of 1939, a third World War might have been upon us, Taylor Starck held this high office. Well, the year 1957 was remarkable enough, setting a milestone also in our affairs in the advent of Sputnik I. But at least we were spared the apocalyptic visions of a thermo-nuclear Armageddon with which we have become but too familiar in this, the year of the Lord 1961.

When, some months ago. President Kennedy stated that, in his opinion, the United States should “shoot the moon,” the chorus of dissenters would have reached the moon itself, except for the unquestioned but often overlooked scientific fact that sound does not travel in a vacuum. Various of my friends have directed their dissensions at me, chiefly, I suspect, because I have long declared in favor of a strong, national program of space research.

This topic was formulated by Win Stone and Don Walsh, and it shows it. There are at least three questions buried—not very deeply—inside it, and there are booby-traps buried inside each of those three questions.

First : Why should a foreign-language teacher teach grammar?

Second: If he should teach grammar, why English grammar?

Third: If he has to teach English grammar, why didn't his students' English teacher teach them English grammar? These three questions are interlocked, and we may admire the Stone-Walsh rhetoric which has homogenized them through a skilful use of noun-modifiers and verb-phrase structure. Nevertheless, let us at least begin by examining the three questions in order, and with some degree of separateness.

It is a pleasure to meet with the professional group that is involved in the most basic and important human cultural activity. Language was a human invention—perhaps the most important of all time. It is not only the principal means of communication within a linguistic or cultural group, but also the means by which each culture is transmitted from one generation to the next. As such it has been a major if not essential factor in the advancement of human civilization.

In the last several years, in large part because of the leadership of the Modern Language Association, the American people have come to understand more clearly than ever before the great importance to our country, in terms of national security if for no other reason, and there are other reasons, of developing and maintaining a reservoir of persons skilled in the knowledge of modern foreign languages. Even a man of little political sensitivity could not fail, a few days ago, to have appreciated the immense impact of the few words spoken in Spanish by Mrs. Kennedy during the President's visit to Latin America.

I am happy to report to you that the Report of Surveys and Studies in the Teaching of Modern Foreign Languages has at last been published. It is 326 pages long, a foot high and a foot wide; our printer and staff have affectionately subtitled it “The Monster.” The fullest and most varied report on foreign-language activities produced in our time, it contains twenty-one of the twenty-eight surveys and studies that the MLA undertook in 1959-61 under contract with the U. S. Office of Education through the National Defense Education Act. Here are a few of its highlights. From the 1959-60 FLES survey report, we know that over a million and a quarter children were studying a foreign language from Kindergarten through Grade 8, nearly a million of them below Grade 7. A little over two thirds of these (671,000) were studying in regular programs, with the classroom teacher or a visiting specialist as the model. The remainder (327,000) were learning from a television teacher. Spanish and French accounted for 95% of the enrollments, Spanish with over three-fifths of the total and French with a little over a third.