The New Year is almost here. Once again—sooner, it seems, each time around—we face the time to make resolutions and the time to take stock and to foretell our own destiny. Having just helped nurse another United Nations General Assembly to bed, I already have my fill of resolutions. But I would like this evening to make and defend a prediction.

It is with some misgiving that I consider the title of this address: all this in twenty minutes! The word responsibility too makes me a little nervous. I am one of those who, in our profession, find themselves handicapped in discussions concerning our aims, hopes, and interests, by the peculiar combination of pseudoscientific jargon and moralistic preachment which any allusion to methods seems to generate. Whoever fails to refer to “structured situations,” “feedback,” “triggered nonthoughtful responses,” “batteries of tests,” “standards” and “values” gives serious intimations of professional immorality. Nonetheless I should have preferred another word, privilege, strength, or even, yes, why not, pleasure. “No man can exist without pleasure,” said Aquinas, nor without it, it seems to me can he learn, mature, or teach well.

In the short span of years since Kipling wrote that “East is East and West is West,/And never the twain shall meet” we have witnessed the meeting of East and West. We have become enmeshed in the resulting tangle of dissident philosophies, and who can predict the eventual outcome?

It would be difficult to place alongside each other two words that have more vague and varied meanings—to most people—than the last two words in the title I have given to these remarks. The words are “cultural” and “communication.” This is not the place—or at any rate, I am not the “professor”—for a seminar in semantics. But I cannot let this opportunity pass without pointing out the problems of nomenclature—of language—with which we must contend. The phrase “educational and cultural affairs” is clearly a case in point. The actual activities covered by this phrase are concrete and specific. But this phrase itself and others like it—cross-cultural relations, cultural interchange, and the like— are imprecise, and therefore largely meaningless to many people.

I am happy to report once again on the year's foreign-language activity. It is varied and vigorous, and it is by no means exclusively sponsored by our FL Program. Our first large production of 1962 was, in fact, a joint MLAAAT enterprise, the Selective List of Materials for Teachers of Modern Foreign Languages in Elementary and Secondary Schools, whose short title, Selective List of Materials, we further abbreviated to S.L.O.M., or simply SLOM. Produced under contract with the U. S. Office of Education, and accompanied by elaborate criteria for evaluating various categories of teaching materials, it gives detailed ratings of materials in ten foreign languages. As part of our contract, we distributed 53,000 free copies to administrators and high-school teachers. In the eight months since publication we have sold only three thousand copies. Our profession seems to be divided into teachers who already have a free copy of SLOM and teachers who have never heard of it. Perhaps the present plug may act as a hearing aid. And despite its full title, this bibliography has value for college teachers as well as for school teachers. It has 128 pages of useful information and it costs only one dollar.

In many ways this particular section meeting has become one of the most significant in the annual program of the Modern Language Association. It serves to provide us with a measuring device which we can use to determine the extent to which we are fulfilling our international educational obligations. Considering the speakers who have been invited to address you today, if this afternoon's program has a theme, it might well be characterized as International Responsibility.