I won't address all of these matters as they are reflected in the schools where you teach and work. I pass over the terribly thorny problem of bilingualism, for example, saying only that it may be a wonderful opportunity rather than a threat, if it could be presented less as a factor of ethnic identity and more as a cultural resource.

While I'm at it, I will indulge a prejudice and speak in favor of Latin and Greek. (In doing so I borrow from Mark Twain: “I know that I am prejudiced in this matter, but I would be ashamed of myself if I weren't.”) Latin and Greek are powerful tools for learning and understanding English, and a rich storehouse of the root words of our scientific and medical vocabulary. There is no quicker way to expand one's grasp of English than by linking it to those Greek and Latin roots. That Latin and Greek also greatly simplify the movement from English into Spanish, French, and Italian was lost sight of in the exhilarating arrogance of our belief that everyone else will have to learn English anyway.

Those who teach science should ally with those who teach language and insist that Latin and Greek be taught as resource languages if not as literatures. The strongest argument for learning a different language is to improve the understanding of one's own. There is a feeling of wonder as other habits of thought and expression are uncovered. Knowing other languages is the way we discover that the "metaphors we live by" can be different: the way we talk about time, for example, is, in another culture, talk about pathways; not about how long it takes, but about how one gets there.

The President's Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies put too little stress on foreign language as a means to language understanding. If you want to test the idea, try to read in French or Spanish something that is very familiar in English. At the time of a memorial service for Marin Luther King, an ecumenical and international service on the hillside at the Presbyterian seminary in Yaounde, Cameroon, I chose to read Lincoln's Gettsburgh Address. Because of my audience, I had to read it twice, in French and in English. It never seemed so powerful and clear to me in English before.

Rhetoric and literature have always dominated our discussions of language. But in recent years that emphasis has changed. Modern scholarship has explored depths of oral language that the Greeks and Romans didn't suspect. The language practices of small groups and the uses of non-verbal communication are subjects you know more about routinely than someone educated as I was before the behavioral science revolution of the 1960s. That language competence is essential in small group intervention is now accepted. Perhaps lost sight of in the process is concern for the language of poetry and love. With all the emphasis on touching and feeling and the obsession with sex there is an appalling decline in concern for the sensitive expression of emotion in words.

What I am most concerned about, as you know by now, is the question of educating our children as citizens. In my own days in high school forty years ago, "civics" was a required subject, and "public speaking" was taken for granted. We were saturated with courses about American tradition and history, and we were expected to participate as citizens in debate about matters of public policy. My first year in high school was the year of Pearl Harbor, and my childhood was dominated by the debates over war and peace. The rhetorical impact of Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler were evident to us all. Even Wendell Willkie displayed a concern for eloquence of expression, and Henry Wallace emerged as a persuasive champion of what he called the common man.

In such a setting it did not seem at all peculiar to require students to learn how to speak and debate. There was not as much emphasis on thinking as the classical tradition would have required, and there was no attention given to listening skills.

The generation of which I am a member has since put its highest value on analytical and scholarly modes of thought. Rhetoric fell into disfavor and disuse. In literary style, Hemingway triumphed over Thomas Wolfe, and Rudolph Flesch emerged as the guide to expression. Simple statements. Short sentences. Strong verbs. Secular not spiritual expression. In the process we may have lost the ability to think with subtlety of understanding, and we may have lost the patience to deal with complexity. The protocol of civil discourse is ignored, and shouting and haranguing become acceptable public behavior. A school board meeting in Queens resembles nothing so much as a parliamentary debate in the new Iran. If the new behavior of verbal and then physical violence continues, what is pathetic on a small scale will become tragic on a larger one.

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It is not too much to say that the survival of our society depends very directly on how well we teach the arts and skills and sciences of language and thought. We have a rich tradition, still at our fingertips, and technology of infinite flexibility and application.

But we are only as good at what we do as citizens as our language permits us to express, as our attention trains us to listen and comprehend, and as our moral tradition compels us to act.