"Learning a foreign language is about a way of being in the world, not about getting the next deal done."
From the NY Times' "What Would Aristotle Think?" by Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, NYU professor and editor of “Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World" (here):
The idea of education as the foundation for an engaged, mindful, citizenry to intelligently deliberate and decide the pressing issues of the day is being ignored in today’s education debate. America’s preoccupation with whether our students are keeping up with their peers in Hong Kong, Shanghai and South Korea overlooks other fundamental purposes of education, confounding “doing well” economically with being fully and productively engaged with the world.
Learning a foreign language is about a way of being in the world, not about getting the next deal done. It telecasts respect for one’s interlocutor and cognitive curiosity even as it nourishes the brain’s jewel in the crown, its executive function. Indeed, neuroscience is beginning to show that the brains of bilinguals may have advantages in what will matter most in the global era: managing complexity, rational planning and meta-cognition.
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