Get Out of Here!

     I never have any real doubts about my constant message to students and faculty regarding the importance of travel abroad and of opening horizons as a means to prepare for the future (or, in some respects, catch up to the present!) Yet, there are times when I wonder why the message doesn’t seem to get through or why students and their institutions simply pay lip service to the concept without truly embracing globalism as a top, if not the top priority for an undergraduate education for the 21st century. When that wondering begins to turn to frustration if not outright despair, I hear or read or experience something from a completely different sector that reminds that I am not alone and that, if I am to fulfill my own commitment to international learning, I must keep pressing on with the message.
     Two recent events have renewed my purpose and recharged my batteries for the struggle. The first was a five-week stint in Europe, surrounded by young Europeans speaking two and three languages, traveling on their own, overcoming obstacles, solving problems by themselves in non-familiar cultural circumstances , in short, living outside their comfort zone in the midst of multiple habits, languages and customs. Within ten years the networks formed and the lessons learned from this summer in terms of how others speak, think, live, and work will have translated into the very skills required for the 21st century workplace among those who hope to lead. These young people constitute the true competition for our current generation of American undergraduates.
     The second event was somewhat less expected but perhaps even more satisfying and potentially more useful in terms of articulating the message to a target group of college administrators and students. While waiting at an airport gate in Munich, I came across a short interview with a Chicago businessman, admired for his entrepreneurial skills yet not readily associated with an international point of view. After describing some of the characteristics that contribute to his own success, this contemporary entrepreneur cuts right through all the verbal dancing that usually accompanies our pleas for internationalism. Here is the exchange between interviewer Adam Bryant, of the New York Times, and Quintin Primo III, founder and CEO of Capri Capital Partners, a Chicago-based real estate investment and development firm:
AB: What is your best advice to young graduates?
QP: Three words: Leave the country. Get out of here. That’s what I tell everybody – just go. I don’t care where you go, just go.
AB: Because?
QP: Because the world is changing. It is no longer acceptable to speak only English if you are 25 and younger. It’s unacceptable. You have little chance of being successful if you speak only one language (…) So you’ve got to get out of your front door, get out of the comfort and quiet of your home, and your safety zone, and step into a pool of risk where you have no idea what the outcome is going to be. Out of it all, you will have a much clearer idea of how the world perceives our culture, and all the value, and the benefits, and the beauty of our culture.
(International Herald Tribune, August 2, 2010)
     Quintin Primo describes the flipside of the travel coin. In order to be a global citizen it is not enough to learn what you can about others; it is just as valuable to learn how others perceive the culture in which we are formed. It can’t be done solely within the four walls of a classroom or the limits of a college campus but there is no better time or opportunity to incorporate this kind of learning than the undergraduate years. So let this become a new mantra for U.S. educators when students come for advice about how to plan for the future: “ Leave the country. Get out of here!”

Job Skills

     On any street in nearly any city or town these days one cannot help but notice the property offices because their windows are plastered with ads for property to buy or rent.  While I was walking down a London street recently, my attention was drawn to such a window only to discover that the ads that covered it were for jobs – jobs at national and international firms.  Curious and somewhat suspicious about this glut of opportunity in hard times, I stopped to see what was available.  There were probably thirty different openings, most for entry or middle level white collar workers, salaries between $35 – 60,000 to start plus benefits, and they all had one thing in common:  the principal requirement was the ability to speak a language in addition to English.  Dutch, German, Italian, French – lots of possibilities but the applicant had to be able to work in two languages.

      The issue of learning one or more foreign languages in order to compete in a global rather than a local economy is one of the truly monumental obstacles for young Americans.  It is not that Americans are “bad” at learning languages.  Many more young people are taking advantage of opportunities to travel and our schools and communities are every day more diverse in terms of ethnic and linguistic representation so that traditional American isolationism is less and less a challenge.  No.  Our students are not learning foreign languages because, for the most part, the adults making decisions about their education don’t think it is very important.  There is much documentation to demonstrate that young children have a particular facility for learning two or more languages simultaneously, yet even in our best school districts, most students don’t even have a choice, and it is invariably a choice not a requirement, to study a second language until middle school at the earliest.  In addition, we don’t do a very good job of explaining to high school students why it might be worth their while to master a second or third language.  In fact, a frequent “incentive” , that a couple of years of classroom language instruction might help them get into a better college or university, has nothing to do with the potential  practical, competitive,  or even educational and cultural benefits of knowing more than one’s native tongue.

     Colleges and universities are not doing much to help this situation.  Even the relatively few that have their own graduation requirements for foreign languages are not generally very discriminating about the preparation that their applicants may have had:  “You took four years in high school but didn’t learn very much?  That’s OK, you can start over again here or we’ll place you into the second year and you’ll just have a couple of semesters to complete the requirement.”  This kind of enabling of mediocrity on the part of higher education sends just the wrong message.  Why do the same colleges and universities that are currently looking at ways to “internationalize” or “globalize” their curricula not demand more in terms of the most authentic way to integrate into and understand how people in a foreign culture think, act and dream?  Until recently it may have been partially accurate to point out that the world conducts its business primarily in English and to the extent that our colleges and universities are preparing students for the workplace, foreign language mastery may not have been at the top of the priority list.  Yet problem solving for the future, just as it will demand the skills of more than one discipline, is also likely to demand a much more thorough understanding of all the people who are involved in contributing to solutions.  Those solutions are becoming both global and interdisciplinary in scope as our “internationalized” curricula are beginning to grasp.  Perhaps it is time to re-think more precisely just what skills American students will need to master if we expect them to compete with their counterparts in other parts of the world and be able to answer the employment ads that draw one’s attention on London streets even in the midst of the current crisis.