Travel, Tech & World Peace

A recent blog post by Arbitrista, entitled "Why Learn French", ignited enough of a spark to get me back here after over a month away. It was a reaction to an article asking why American students were being required to learn languages like French & Italian as opposed to those that might be more useful in today's world, like Chinese or Arabic. I think Arbitrista makes a great case in his post, which is nicely summed up by his closing sentence:

"It's not that Americans won't be learning French in school that bothers me. It's that they won't be learning anything."

I am a HUGE history fan, and I love learning new languages. As it so happens, French and Italian are the ones I'm trying to learn now. But as important as I think those subjects are, I'm willing to sacrifice time spent on both of them. For one thing, English is now pretty much acknowledged as the international language of choice. If you are going to travel the world, for instance, and only have one language at your disposal, then English is the most practical one to have these days.

What I think is one of the most important things that should be taught in American schools is awareness of the rest of the world as it is today.  

One of the biggest contributors to American ignorance and bigotry is the distorted pictures people have in their heads of the rest of the world. Certainly, a lot of it is learned in the home. But it's obvious that younger generations are much more open minded than their elders, the polls reflect it. A lot of us grow up constantly hearing all sorts of racist and bigoted opinions and still manage to recognize them as wrong.

Still, this needs to be done in every grade, starting with the very youngest. It's long overdue, and it would make a world of difference in this country.

As a country, we are way too insular, and not only do we have a distorted picture of the rest of the world, many people still have this image of the United States as being the very best at everything. Not that we were ever perfect. Even at the height of our superpower status after WWII, we were covering up our abuse of Japanese Americans. Next came the fight against segregation. There's always been something. Hell, do they even present the beginnings of this country as war against Native Americans yet?

Still, there was a time when we were legitimately head and shoulders above most other countries in many ways. That is no longer the case. Our educational and health care systems are but two of the enormous factors bringing us down. Great strides in technology are being made in many other places besides Silicon Valley. But with the technology available to us today, there is no reason for our relative geographic isolation to keep us from knowing what people in other parts of the world are really like.

I mean, don't we all have contacts in other countries due to our interactions online?

I saw an ad about a grade school class who went on a "field trip" to China via Skype, or something like it. They visited other children the same age and conversed via translators. We need more of that. That is how we bridge the gulf of cultural differences.

Advances in travel have made the world a much smaller place. Advances in technology, specifically the Internet, has the potential to make the world a much better place. Considering how much garbage there is on the damn thing, that's pretty amazing.