Editorial: Make culture mandatory, language optional

Broadly speaking, the aim of the University’s distribution requirements is to give students a minimal level of familiarity with the different methodological approaches that characterize the range of academic disciplines. It is plausible to think that this aim can reliably be achieved by the current system of distribution requirements: While a classics major will likely forget much of the physics or biology he learns taking an introductory science class for non-majors, he will retain some understanding of what scientists do, how they do it and why it matters.

The aim of the foreign language requirement is simpler: to just be proficient in a foreign language. Indeed, the University acknowledges that this is the only aim, since the University permits the language requirement, but not distribution requirements, to be satisfied outside of Princeton courses. It is far less plausible, though, that this aim will be satisfied by the current requirement: Unwilling students forced into taking four semesters of a language will attain only a minimal level of proficiency and will likely forget much of what they have learned quite soon after their study of the language ends. Forcing students to devote so much time to a subject from which they will draw little profit is especially unfortunate because unlike many courses offered by Princeton, there is relatively little difference between the type of instruction offered in Princeton’s language classes — memorizing vocabulary, grammar and the like — and the instruction offered at many less-rigorous institutions, or even by programs like Rosetta Stone. Filling up a course slot with an unwanted language class may be unappealing for a student who might have otherwise taken an interesting lecture or a seminar with a popular professor.

Some may object, arguing that the study of foreign culture is an essential component of a liberal arts education because it forces students to understand how different cultures may have adopted starkly different perspectives in areas in which we view our own perspective as natural and inevitable. We agree. Therefore, we would propose that the University replace the language requirement with an additional distribution requirement, under which students take two classes in foreign cultural studies. We do not mean to suggest that it is possible to gain a complete understanding of a given foreign culture without learning that culture’s language. Rather, we believe that a basic level of proficiency in foreign cultural understanding will be instilled more effectively by courses whose explicit aim is to achieve that understanding than by courses that focus more on the mechanics of communication in a particular language. Changing this requirement would reduce the burden of Princeton’s general education requirements while more effectively accomplishing an important pedagogical goal.