Le Lycee Francais de Los Angeles - Actualites Yearbook (Los Angeles, CA)

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THE WAY WE WERE

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Second Language Helps Kids Grow BX MILT FREUDENHEIM Tin Chlcaoo Dally News 7 PARIS — Teaching American children to speak French at an early age can speed up all their learning, processes, says Roger Masters, a .Dart- mouth professor fOTnierly with the U.S. Embassy here. ■Children who learn two languages starting in kin- dergarten go on to be able to solve problems at age 9 that 12-year-olds usually find chalfenging, he said in an interview. Each language has its own certain way of rea- soning about problems, Dr. Masters added. Text- books on the same sub- jects come to the same conclusions by different routes. By comparing a science lesson in two languages, the students see that there can be more than one sa- tisfactory solution to a problem— good training for working in the com- puterized sciences of to- day. Interest Changes A political scientist with his doctor ' s degree from the University of Chicago. he has shifted his interest to research in biology and human behavior. Masters, 38, began learning French himself in an Army correspon- dence course. ■ He con- tinued studying it at Chi- cago and on a Fulbrlght grant to France writing a book on French philoso- pher Jean-Jacques Rous ' seau. Now he has returned to Dartmouth after two years as U.S. cultural attache in the Paris Embassy. One of his projects was doubling and seeking to redouble the number of French and American teachers on one- year exchange programs between the two coun- tries. He .believes that work- ing in another country where foreign standards must be accepted in order to get along is a good an- tidote to the main crisis of our time — subjectivism. American kids can. «T g u e about whether ' n ' t ' is or isn ' t good Eng- lish. But if they are worlc- ing in a foreign language they are forced to conform to somebody else ' s stan- dards of grammar. If they can ' t say it in that language, they are cooked. Hazy Distinctions He says the children of our affluent society are brought up with only a hazy distinction between their desires and dreams and objective reality. Masters doesn ' t think drifting with other Ameri- cans in foreign countries in the haze of the interna- tional youth culture helps much. He want? young people to go abroad for a year and work. You can ' t, ask an af- fluent society ' s kids to pretend that they don ' t have money, he says. But you can ask them to do things that are hard, in- tellectually or physically.