Education: Modern Foreign Languages

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Grand Committee

[Lord Dykes (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful for what has been said in the previous four speeches, particularly by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins. I am a fellow officer of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages. We are very proud of the noble Baroness because of her leadership and all the unstinting work that she has done with the British Council to promote this issue. It is very easy and tempting still for foolish people in Britain to regard it as a marginal subject of no consequence whatever; it is extremely important. Even if we want the subject just for cultural and intellectual reasons, there is also the reality that we lose business at the margin all over the world because we do not bother to have proper language teaching and learning in our schools and universities, and in business.

That is unlike in other countries. I admire the supreme modesty and efficiency of the German population, most of whom speak better English than we do when we go over there. When I try to insist that I do a speech in German—because I speak German myself—they always say, “Oh, no, do it in English because we can follow it easily”. It is a remarkable achievement in a country like that, of 82 million people, that they have been so caring about this subject.

I personally am lucky because—like the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, and others, I think—I always found languages extremely easy. Therefore, I mastered at a very early age the main European languages plus Russian and did not find them difficult for some bizarre, rather nerdy reason; I found them very easy and exciting. I started quite late, being six, seven or eight before I started reading some French. Even infants, if they get the access through their parents, can start learning languages as if they are games, puzzles, contests and competitions. They really enjoy that. It is one reason why children in Britain are learning Mandarin with incredible proficiency at a very young age. Spanish is a very easy language. As we know, it is completely phonetic, except where it is indicated with an appropriate symbol. It is therefore easier for those languages to be grasped at an early age.

However, they are all important. Those mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, show the priorities but also the need not to neglect other languages—I am glad that she and others in this debate have mentioned the Indian subcontinent as well. It is interesting to see how the Chinese have dealt with learning English. It is now a huge learning system in China, a country that need not have bothered because it was very committed to its own activities.

It is important for business to take these things up inside companies and with the trade unions. It has always been difficult to persuade people when they say, “Oh, well, it is not my subject. I’m concerned with the job and the work we do”. But languages is not just at the margin; it is intrinsic to the very salvation of this country. Bad effects are coming along from this Brexit nightmare—and it is not just a debate about interesting possibilities and options; it is a total nightmare for this country. Therefore, one of the best things to do is to stay in the EU and encourage a language learning programme with it as well as with others.