An American Education Expert Said…

An American education expert said a few months ago that a good education no longer requires the study of foreign languages, since artificial intelligence is already capable of instant translations, and that time can be put to better use in other subjects. A good command of English is sufficient, he concluded. What can we say? Much has been said about the effects of language study on intelligence; Napoleão Mendes de Almeida, in his unsurpassed Latin Grammar, argues in favor of Latin. For someone whose mother tongue is English, however, there may be nothing more relevant to his intellectual development than to learn, desesperately, as early as possible, a syntactically more complex language—even Spanish will suffice. But how to convince the expert? If he does not realize it immediately, perhaps there is no solution. His perspective must be reversed: the man of the future, the more advantages he enjoys, the more he will have to strive not to squander abilities that only focused effort can develop.