You have asked me, as Chairman of the Commission on the Humanities, to speak about support of the humanities and the arts and, presumably, about the views of the Commission. This I cannot do, for the Commission has not completed its work and would, in any case, present its report to the bodies that have sponsored it.

Men create institutions to do those things together which they cannot do satisfactorily alone. This of course is why there are learned societies. It must be a matter of particular pride to President Nicolson that the Modern Language Association of America, from its beginnings in a group of forty scholars on the Columbia campus more than eighty years ago, has grown to approximately 15,000 members. In its growth, it has performed a service for scholarship and education in foreign languages and in English which leaves the Nation in its debt.

I start with the obvious starting point: the gap between teaching and scholarship. For the most part, the conceptions of the arts and sciences which are presented to children in school are not those that contemporary scholars regard as being in fact the elementary principles of those subjects as now conceived. I think it was the mathematicians who first realized that the elementary mathematics taught in schools reflected conceptions of the subject that were centuries out of date. They have begun to do something about this, and to try to develop a curriculum for mathematics which will present, in a logical sequence, a contemporary view of what mathematics is. Other subjects, including English, remain uncoordinated, based on what are at best ad hoc principles. At one end there are the techniques for teaching children to read, which are said to be very efficient when they work, and at the other there are the survey courses of the first year in university, designed to give a student some notion of the chronological order in which the great classics got written. I think it should be possible to work out a curriculum for the intervening stages which will treat literature as a progressive and systematic study, and which will furnish the student with something of tangible and permanent value at whatever stage he drops out of it. It seems to me that, as with mathematics, the first procedure is to make sure that the literary sequence makes sense in itself, regardless of its relations with other subjects, even in elementary school. The relation with other subjects is certainly important and essential, but must come later in consideration.

It is self-evident that teacher training is the heart of the matter in any consideration of trends in any area of the curriculum. As the anthropologist regards the practices of childrearing as both a segment of the culture and the surest index to its value system of today and tomorrow, so we may look at our procedures of training teachers as a part of our own professional folkways and at the same time a revelation of which things are to be prized now and in the future. But to think of trends is necessarily to think of the historic conflict of change with continuity, and to think of change raises the question, With reference to what? I therefore want to comment on the themes of change versus continuity (better known as inertia), of relevance, and of the preparation of teachers of modern foreign languages.

Describing a year's activity in a half-hour report is an annual challenge that grows more difficult as the pace and scope of the activity increase. The Foreign Language Program is in some ways the victim of its success. One of our early goals was to become an information center and we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. Requests for materials, information, opinions, and assistance threaten to overwhelm us daily. Three members of the staff do nothing but answer these requests. The ones that are unanswerable are put in my in-basket. Telephone calls and visitors multiply. All this activity we are tempted to think of as interruptions to our real job, long-range planning, deep thinking, foreign languages in the next century. But in a very real sense the magnitude of the interruptions to our job is the sign that we are succeeding, that more and more foreign-language teachers and students and more and more people in general want to know the answers to questions and the solutions to problems of which they were hardly conscious a few years ago. There has been a revolution in language learning in this country and among recent visitors to our office have been language teachers and administrators from all over the world (France, England, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Africa, Australia), who have come to find out what we are doing.

The conferences on which this report is based were financed by a contract between the MLA and the U. S. Office of Education. The Advisory Committee of the FL Program, at its November 1963 meeting, recommended that the report be published in PMLA as a thoughtful consideration of an important problem.