Word: frohock
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This, a major academic problem, affects Harvard crucially, for this university has gained the reputation of sustained leadership in almost all fields of college study. But, in the words of Professor Wilbur M. Frohock, chairman of the Romance Languages department, "In advances and in the teaching of elementary languages, Harvard is following and not leading." A recent survey by the Chicago Tribune would seem to back Frohock's statement. Whereas Harvard was chosen as the top college in the country, seven out of its 28 major fields were labelled as "undistinguished." French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Linguistics were five...
...many feel, to impose a language requirement on college students who may be particularly inept at such study and who will be saddled with these elementary courses when they could be moving into higher academic brackets in other fields. The reasoning behind this is similar to that of Frohock, who maintains "I've never known an educated man who didn't know at least two languages...
...best place to learn a new language or more specifically, to pass one's language requirement; other institutions have realized this and have started to do something about it. "Certain other forward looking universities, such as Cornell and Columbia were doing seven years ago what we are doing now," Frohock points...
Harvard is behind because it never kept up. "We did not take advantages of the lessons learnt in World War II," Frohock says, "while such colleges as Cornell, Wesleyan, and Princeton did." Cornell, for instance, has an ambitious new program of language teaching which it started experimentation on as early as 1946. The question then must be: why did Harvard allow itself to become stagnated in an ivy-encrusted system first instituted by some English private school headmaster when it became evident that there were quicker and more efficient ways of learning a language...
Harvard, while recognizing the merits of this system, is not willing to go this far. "We are planning more and more emphasis on speaking," Frohock says, "but the fact remains that while my barber may speak French better than I do, he hasn't got a single intelligent thing to say in it. For myself, speaking is only important, because it helps you to learn to write the language." The Romance Language Department's plans for the next few years then definitely do include a new emphasis on oral teaching, but not to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual...