In French and German studies we are at our wits’ end
Fewer and fewer students that study French and German, a growing teacher shortage and fear of budget cuts: what a poverty, write didactician French Rosalinde Stadt and didactician German Mireille Hassemer in this opinion piece. “You lose the enormous scope – which the Netherlands has always had – by not nurturing foreign languages.”
This week, students and teachers demonstrated on Malieveld in The Hague to protest against the Schoof administration’s upcoming cuts to higher education. The cuts put the important school languages French and German even more at risk.
Studies in French language and culture and German language and culture are already struggling at Dutch universities. In Utrecht, there are plans to abolish the bachelors of French and German (along with other studies valuable for our time such as religious studies and Islam), and in Leiden, the bachelors of French and German are disappearing in the broad bachelor of European languages. With the forthcoming drastic cuts, it is a matter of time until other universities where French and German still exist as independent studies are also forced to further reduce these language studies. French and German studies are at a loss because student numbers are small, yielding too little return. But as Marc Rutgers – chair of Leiden’s humanities faculty board – emphasized this week in EenVandaag: the humanities should be profitable as a whole, not per subject. Besides, cancelling or merging with other studies only leads to even fewer students. After all, there will then not only be less supply, but also a less attractive offer.
We in teacher training are at our wits’ ends. There is less and less recruitment from French and German studies, and the teacher shortage is increasing. In schools, classes are dropping out, and school boards sometimes even have to make the painful choice of discontinuing one of the school languages. What poverty! Then you have gone through secondary school, and you cannot make yourself understood in German. The foundation for learning several foreign languages is laid in secondary school and this should not be lost.
The Dutch are known for speaking several foreign languages and being able to express themselves in different cultural contexts. This is one of our trademarks. Germany is our most important neighbour in this respect, and the school languages French and German (and of course Spanish) broaden students’ world enormously. In fact, these world languages are also spoken in large parts of Africa and North and South America. Learning to speak these languages, and understanding different manners, cannot be overcome with AI (or English). You lose the enormous scope – which the Netherlands has always had – by not nurturing foreign languages. We need more rather than less knowledge of languages to talk to and understand each other.
We often wonder why secondary school students are less and less likely to choose to study French or German. Does studying a language not fit with the efficiency-thinking that dominates our society? Is studying a language not sufficiently offered as a serious option by high school deans and teachers? Or do students see studying a language as a glorified language course? Either way, it is a shame because the job prospects for graduates have been favourable for decades. The Dutch economy is very dependent on the French and German economies. For instance, the trade relationship between the Netherlands and Germany is one of the largest in Europe and France has been among our main trading partners for years (RFO). And on top of that, of course, they are eager for you in education. And to be clear: language studies are not language courses.
Language students are trained at university to become fully-fledged humanities scholars: they not only learn the target language, they study the literature, culture, politics and history of the target language and take linguistics courses so that they learn how language is constructed, functions and influences people’s thinking and actions. All academic skills needed for the future and knowledge of our traditionally outward-looking Netherlands.
The disappearance of French and German studies therefore has major implications for secondary education, and the language skills of our next generation. Students – like language students at university – learn to look at the world in different ways. This requires broad and well-trained language teachers. They have to deal with complex material on language, language use, culture and literature with students. How can they do this without a solid prior education? Pupils in the Netherlands deserve well-trained foreign language teachers, just as the previous generation and the generations before it had. And the basis for this lies at university in the faculty of humanities.
