The note sent last year to all staff had what is, for anyone in paid work these days, a familiar structure and a familiar tone. First there was the obligatory self-congratulation: Queen’s University Belfast was, and would continue to be, “one of the best universities on these islands.”
In fact, there was a new aim — to be among the top universities in the world, with a new philosophy, politics and economics department, more psychology, more drug research. Unfortunately, this meant some “tough decisions” also had to be made. A total of 103 staff would be let go — and the German department would cease to exist.
Appalled letters (private and public), a Facebook protest, a letter signed by academics from German departments across the country, a march, protests from A-level (school leaving exam) students — none made any difference. Once the current intake of Queen’s University German students have finished their degrees in 2012, that will be that.
This is no philistinic blip on the higher education landscape. It is a pattern being repeated all across Britain. The University of Leicester, for example, will not have a German department from 2013. However, it is not just German: The University of the West of England, in Bristol, has just stopped providing half-degrees in French, Spanish and Chinese (German went four years ago). In fact, Language Matters, a recent report from the British Academy, says as many as a third of university language departments have closed in the past seven years.
“There are regions in the UK,” the report concluded, “where there is virtually no substantive higher-education language provision.”
Among the reasons Queen’s cited for canceling German was unsustainable student numbers.
“Unsustainable” is also the word being used by senior management at Leicester — perhaps because the managers concerned know that, on a national level, this is inarguable.
Ever since the previous government decided, in 2004, to make language learning optional after the age of 14, the numbers have been dropping. Tuesday’s General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) — exams taken at age 14 to 16 — results revealed that three-quarters of students did not sit a French exam this year, with entries having dropped 6 percent from a year ago to only 177,618. German fared little better, falling 4.5 percent to 70,169. A slight uplift in Spanish entrants (almost 1 percent, to 67,707) and greater interest in non-traditional languages, such as Chinese and Polish, was not enough to patch over a clear and depressing trend.
Caitlin Thomson, 16, stopped taking German as soon as she could.
“I didn’t really like it that much,” she says. “I didn’t understand it, and I found studying it hard.”
Perhaps that was because she had only done any kind of language learning for two years, between 11 and 13. She thinks that that was maybe too late to start.
“If you start doing something younger, you have more interest in it,” she says.
The Department for Children, Schools and Families says that languages will be compulsory for seven to 11-year-olds from next year, yet currently, only one in four primary schools offers any access to languages at all.
“There are schools,” president of the British Academy Onora O’Neill says, “who put zero children in for modern languages.”
That is partly because language provision is dividing, sharply, along class lines. A recent study found that 38 percent of 14-year-olds in the state sector were studying one modern language; a mere 1.9 percent were studying two. On the other hand, 99 percent of 14-year-olds at independents studied at least one language, and all schools provided French and German. Students at independents are five times as likely to achieve A’s (the top grade) in French, German and Spanish at GCSE as those in the state sector, meaning that by A-level language, students are overwhelmingly middle-class. At degree level, it is only really the pre-1992, Russell Group (older) universities that receive language applications in any numbers.
Making languages optional was, O’Neill says, partly about improving access to education for the less able.
Unfortunately, this was founded on “an illusion that a good education for children of fewer advantages is to introduce more choice, and introduce subjects where it is easier to get As and Bs. It is such a silly take on improving access.”
One of the many unintended results is that “the experience of other cultures is now confined to an elite,” says Michael Kelly, director of the Southampton-based Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies.
Even the Confederation of British Industry is worried that British businesses are being forced to recruit more and more foreign language speakers from overseas.
“I think it’s been a case of market failure, really,” Kelly says. “Markets [for subjects] tend to be pretty short term — what you enjoy studying now, and what you get immediate return from, but languages are much more long term. It takes a long time to get competent; there’s no instant gratification. So within an [education] market, languages will tend to lose out.”
“But that’s the reason we have a state: to deal with market failure. We’ve had failure in the banks and the state has stepped in because it’s too important. I would make the same argument about languages — they are too important, strategically, to be left to market forces,” Kelly says.
In the meantime, concludes the British Academy report, “a whole generation risks being ‘lost to languages.’”
Of all the usual languages offered in schools, German suffers most. If only one language is offered, it is, for historical reasons, usually French. If two languages are offered, German is increasingly pipped to the post by Spanish — which has a reputation for being easier, and is useful on the Costa Brava. German is seen as difficult and, thanks to things such as the History Channel, inseparable from Hitler and World War II.
Teachers of German are also increasingly competing with other influences — Japanese, for example.
Professor Frank Finlay, president of the association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland, identifies Japan’s “role in popular culture — manga and so on — that’s been influential. It’s got a very positive image among 16, 17 and 18-year-olds. Which German doesn’t in the same way.”
While the total numbers are still small, Mandarin Chinese is also among the fastest growing languages in schools, with GCSE entries up 5 percent on last year, and the number of pupils taking a GCSE in Arabic has almost doubled since 2002.
One major argument for canceling German at Queen’s University was that the department had not performed well enough in the Research Assessment Exercise, a process by which individual departments are independently ranked according to the quality of research they have done — thus indicating how much money they deserve to get from the government the next year. The most recent assessment, in 2008 (there had not been one for seven years previously) coincided with the economic downturn, and the combined impact has been felt by universities across Britain, especially in the humanities.
Specifically, “the government has reduced the research funding for languages,” Kelly says. “And that’s affected traditional universities — ie, the universities that do languages. Not all, but most. Oxford University, for example, promptly lost £1 million (US$1.5 million) in language research funding.”
“As a result, a lot of universities are looking to see whether they need to reduce the number of subjects they offer,” Kelly says.
Managements across the spectrum, from primary school to postgraduate study, seem to see cutting languages as the obvious way reduce their costs.
Language classes are intensive, requiring small class sizes, so, as Sarah Colvin, Mason chair of German at the University of Edinburgh, said recently: “At a time when university funding is being severely reduced, languages look like an easy way to save money.”
“I did French until year two,” says Philippa Grogan, now 15, “but then the school couldn’t afford to have a French teacher any more, so I stopped.”
The money argument, however, is not as straightforward as it seems. Regarding the cutting of Queen’s German department, the Belfast Telegraph reported that Northern Ireland’s Department of Employment and Learning had actually just increased learning and teaching provision by 2 percent, while research provision had increased by 7.7 percent from the previous academic year. Not long after the Research Assessment Exercis results, the German department won £100,000 in grants, through a joint venture with the University of Freiberg, and various British Academy monies. Nevertheless, Queen’s insists that cuts will allow money to be re-invested in already high-performing areas.
Therein lies another fraught issue: “High-performing” is increasingly interpreted as meaning “practical.” Under the last government, the Higher Education Funding Council for England proposed to stop funding what it called “pointless” research; from 2012, universities would have to demonstrate that their research influenced public policy or society, and had demonstrable economic benefits.
Scientists are already up in arms.
“Giving up on that tradition of deep intellectual discovery in favor of immediate economic benefit is a huge mistake,” said Neil Turok, a leading theoretical physicist who worked with Stephen Hawking at Cambridge. “You lose the gem of creative, insightful, long-term thinking. That is what Britain has done so spectacularly in the past, and to give that up is a tragedy.”
The effect on the humanities would be even more dire.
The irony, of course, is that languages do actually contribute to the economy, if not in completely obvious ways, and that losing them is already beginning to have a severe impact. In research terms, as the British Academy report points out, lack of languages severely limits the type of research that can be engaged in in Britain: With German, for example, the effect spreads through philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche); politics (Marx, Engels, Weber, Adorno); history (a good chunk of the 20th-century is lost to historians who cannot decode primary sources); music (Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann become increasingly remote); science (Germans have won 74 Nobel prizes in the sciences); English literature (the impact of Goethe, Schlegel, Schiller, Mann was not confined to Germany); theology (Calvin, Luther, Barth) ... it is a long, long list.
“It is a philistine move,” as O’Neill puts it, “and it is quite disabling for people who want to feel confident in a whole variety of cultural areas.”
In financial terms, this means researchers being increasingly unable to compete for EU funding — and lost jobs in British universities, as increasingly they find they have to hire polyglot researchers from Europe.
It is not just universities, either. O’Neill tells a story about an airport in the northeast that offers charter flights to Spain and Norway and needed someone to make announcements in those languages.
“No school leaver in the area could do it. That seems to me an own goal in employment terms — and the northeast has quite high unemployment,” O’Neill says.
Already, notes the British Academy, there is only one UK citizen working in continental Europe for every four EU citizens working in the UK.
“Britain is greatly under-represented in EU civil services,” O’Neill says.
“We haven’t enough interpreters, because too many don’t have good enough language skills” — in fact, she says, they often don’t possess a sensitive enough grasp of tone, register and technical vocabulary in English, let alone other languages because British attitudes to language tends to be sloppy.
The impact is felt throughout politics, and in national security, as it makes it harder for anti-terrorism squads, for example, to work together.
French is the first language of more than 100 million people and the second language of up to 300 million people. Twenty-nine countries and a whole raft of international bodies count it one of their official languages.
German is spoken by 101 million people worldwide and Germany is, says Finlay, “[Britain’s] single most important trading partner. It’s one of the world’s largest exporters. It’s an economic giant, a key player in the European Union.”
German is, as O’Neill puts it, “the language the employers say they most want to have.”
It is true, says Kelly, that many Germans speak English — “but they are proud of their own language and are pleased if potential partners can make a gesture towards it. And it’s easier to buy things in English than to sell them.”
He quotes Willy Brandt: “If I’m selling I’m happy to speak to you in English, but if I’m buying dann mussen sie Deutsche sprechen.”
The impact on British exports is obvious.
Even if the vast majority of pupils never use their languages after they leave school, there are many studies that prove learning a language makes them better at learning everything else. Children who study a foreign language are better at maths than students who do not — even when language classes mean they have less time in maths classes. Bilingual children are better at reading and spelling, better at grammar and word-recognition; they write better. Young children taught second languages have better cognitive flexibility and creative thinking skills. There is even a study that found students who studied Latin, French, German or Spanish in high school performed better at college than students of equal academic ability who did not take a foreign language.
Ultimately, it is striking, and perhaps says much about current attitudes to education, that no one seems to feel safe enough — in public at least — to make the argument that modern languages might be worth studying, and defending, for their own sake. That to be able to read Kafka or Cervantes or Proust in the original, or understand the words to a Schubert lieder, might have value in and of itself, or at the very least might increase our pleasure and understanding of the language we already speak.
“Whoever is not acquainted with languages knows nothing of his own,” as Goethe put it.
“I think in the end that’s the deepest reason why [this trend] is disastrous,” O’Neill says. “It leads to people leading insular lives — intellectually, professionally, culturally.”
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