My contribution to this year's conference of the Modern Language Association is an inquiry which can hardly be reduced to concrete terms: Meaning and Destiny in Western Literature. And yet our attention is to be engaged by five concrete literary figures—symbolic not only of the spirit of the people in whose languages they originated, but of the spirit and soul of the European community as a whole. They have been familiar to you from your youth—as familiar as the skyline of your native mountains, or your cities, or as any landmark in the town of your childhood: Oedipus, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan, and Faust.

Only fifteen months ago the President signed the National Defense Education Act into Law. Many of you here know what went into getting that legislation in the form necessary for acceptance by Congress. It is no exaggeration to say that without the Modern Language Association there may never have been an NDEA. Certainly, languages would not have received the attention they deserved without the strong support, research, and testimonial efforts of the MLA and its members.

When your distinguished Secretary invited me to speak to you today, we spoke casually of a factual report on the language development feature of the National Defense Education Act. It is tempting to rehearse for you what this Act has already done and what it shows certain promise of doing for the development of modern foreign language study in the United States; to report to you that only a year after the Act's passage, more than 50,000 youngsters are getting better instruction as a consequence of institute training for their teachers; that the so-called “neglected” languages have been given so much attention that French, German, and Spanish now feel distinctly neglected; and that more money has been committed for research in the teaching of modern foreign languages in this past year than has been spent for this purpose in all recorded history. But all of this can be read (or told to you by the Prophet Mildenberger and his disciples, who, so far as I can see, are stationed at every corner of this hotel) and I prefer to direct my remarks to a single aspect of the complex language development program in which we are jointly engaged; one that I trust has great common interest for this audience, and one that in its implications suggests some weighty responsibilities for your profession: the role of the college and university in the preparation of language teachers.

The year began uneasily, with the Director of the FL Program, Kenneth Mildenberger, on loan as a consultant to the U. S. Office of Education, a loan so long extended that it has practically become a gift, our loss and the country's gain, for Ken, succeeding Bill Parker, is now Chief of the Language Development Section of the Division of Higher Education of the Office of Education of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This series, duly extended, ends, as all admirers of “Our Town” will remember, in “The Mind of God.”

Probably never in our national history has there been such a positive interest in the study of foreign languages. I use the word positive deliberately, for I am sure all of us can identify points of negative interest in this matter, even in our recent past, to the extent that, in some quarters, the disappearance of foreign language study in this country was actually considered inevitable and desirable.

Unlike the other countries of northern Europe, Finland has two official languages, Finnish and Swedish, a fact which is reflected in the emphasis placed on languages in the high-school curriculum. In the coastal communities from Lovisa to Turku (Åbo) on the southern shore, as well as in the towns from Pori (Björneborg) to Pietarsaari (Jakobstad), Swedish influence is stronger than anywhere else in Finland, and in many of these towns and villages only Swedish is spoken. In these communities and in the national capital itself, therefore, government workers and employees of business and industry are required to be fluent in both official languages. As in other bilingual countries, the use of two languages can be observed not only in official government documents, currency, postagestamps, and the like, but also in such things as signposts, advertisements, menus in restaurants, and time-tables. There are radio and television programs in both languages, and foreign films appear with two sets of subtitles on the same film, one in Finnish and one in Swedish. Thus whatever one's first language is, there is always ample opportunity to hear and see the other official language written. It should be mentioned, however, that ninety per cent of the population speaks Finnish as the first language and that very little Swedish can be heard in northern and in eastern Finland (except, of course, on the radio), but even in those Finnish-language areas, people are exposed to written Swedish on the label of virtually every product they buy, if nowhere else.