Robin Wilton's esoterica

US Supreme Court nominations, and indeed presidential ones, still look somewhat strange to us Brits. We don't see any of whatever goes on behind the scenes of our judicial appointments, and even in the case of political appointments (such as Tony Blair's choice of Lord Irvine as Lord Chancellor) we don't get the forensic dissection of every past speech and judgement which is the norm in the US. We are starting to get it with political party leaders... usually about whether a candidate ever smoked pot at university. I'm bound to say, in this day and age, for a national political leader to profess that they have never so much as taken a puff seems to me to set them apart from the experience of a very sizeable section of the population (if the statistics are anything to go by). It's entertaining to while away a few minutes thinking what other life experiences a future prime minister could forego without rendering him- or herself unsuitable for the job: employment? alcohol? sex? using a motor car? travelling abroad? going to church? What would we think about someone who had never done any of those things... and would we want them running the country? But I digress. Back to Ms Miers: given that it's normal to rake over every pronouncement a candidate has made, and given that (with no judicial experience) she doesn't have the back-catalogue of published judgements a more conventional candidate would have... wasn't it rather predictable that her record of advice in the White House would be the target of scrutiny? Perhaps her nomination was, how can I put it, "politically optimistic"?

Looking back through my blog, I think you'd be hard put to find many occasions on which I have wholeheartedly endorsed a policy put forward by our enlightened government. Partly that's because I tend to be struck by those policies which are absurd, inconsistent or just plain wrong. Partly it's because they seem to do a lot of daft things, or sensible things a daft way. Now there are proposals which have a lot of sense in them, to increase the teaching of foreign languages to primary-school children. The proposals are not perfect: for some reason the plans are restricted to 7 to 11 year-olds (why only start at 7, when most children will have been in primary school since the age of 5?). However, this is better than nothing, and could repair a deficiency in our education system which I think damages both the children concerned and our broader national interests. Learning additional languages is good. Learning them early is even better. Personally, I think 7 years old is already late: think of the readiness with which infants learn their mother tongue, and the way in which they take for granted the fact that some people around them speak a different language. I spent my first few years surrounded by English and Arabic, and apparently was as comfortable in either as a 3-4 year old needs to be (after all, at that age you're not exactly discoursing on the finer points of Renaissance needlework...). However, I was also aware of linguistic context: if my father spoke to me in Arabic (he's English, but was teaching Arabic at the time) I would always reply in English. Friends in mixed-language marriages have told me they have to be consistent about this: if one parent speaks, say, French to the children and the other English, they have to stick to that. Speaking the 'wrong' language (i.e. the one the child expects from the other parent) infuriates the child and they just stop listening. I've seen it happen. I am also convinced that learning another language early makes it easier for people to learn other languages subsequently. I'm afraid I forgot all the Arabic I used to speak as a toddler, but then started to learn French at the age of four because I was sent to a French nursery school. in Cairo. Then we came back to England. Guess what: no language tuition. I forgot the French too, through disuse. We moved to Belgrade. I picked up some Serbo-Croat because I needed it in order to make friends and buy sweets... I went to an American grade school. We started French lessons and it all came back again. At later schools I studied German and Russian (but forgot almost all the Serbo-Croat), and went on to take a degree in French. Actually using the languages, of course, makes them stick long-term, and for some reason I find these days that what I learn sticks for longer. When I started to travel on business, I tried to make sure I could at least say a few words in whatever it might be... Italian, Norwegian, Turkish, even if it was only 'hello', 'please may I have' and 'thank you'. I don't say that to blow my own trumpet, but I'm sure that an early start (and the resulting long-term familiarity with the concept of other languages) has made me confident about learning new languages, and that in turn makes it easier to do. People react better to you if you speak their language. In Turkey particularly, the surprised smiles I got for being able to reply to a greeting, or ask for stamps, really made the effort worthwhile. Conversely, I went to Spain on holiday without learning enough Spanish; we were staying some way from the tourist centres, and I have seldom felt as frustrated, embarrassed and generally 'unable to interact'. All of a sudden, it made "abroad" an unsettling and alien place to be, which is not a recipe for a relaxing holiday! That's why I think failing to teach our children languages makes life harder for them in the long term. In these times above all, we do not need generations of Anglophones who regard "abroad" as a frustrating, embarrassing, unsettling and alien place. We need them to be comfortable with other languages, able to interact confidently, and therefore able to understand and appreciate what makes another people 'tick'.