At Seminole High School, the same mission statement hangs in most every classroom: “Students who graduate from Seminole High School shall be prepared to begin a career and continue their education at a post-secondary technical school, community college, or university.” This succinct statement sets out the basic goals of the school: to prepare the student for the challenges of a career, and give the student the preparation needed to be able to explore possibilities available to him or her after graduation. Yet, if the teaching of foreign languages is neglected, students will be cut off from a number of opportunities for growth and learning, and Seminole High School will not be able to provide students with the best preparation possible for life outside its doors.

Learning a country’s language is the only way a student can ever hope to be able to enter that country to study, take a job, or vacation more successfully. If the school can provide language instruction in a language as widely spoken as Spanish or Mandarin Chinese, the job market, and number of opportunities for colleges, for that student after he or she graduates will increase manifold. Few would doubt that this runs counter to the goals of the school.

Learning a new language can also open doors in one’s mind. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—a fancy term for the idea that different languages make people think differently—posited exactly that, that the way people think is directly influenced by the structure of the language or languages they speak. Many cultural attitudes are reflected in language and its structure. Some people have even gone so far as to create their own languages that attempt to remove these connotations from language. Esperanto, one of the first truly popular constructed languages, or conlangs, was created in order to remove the cultural bias common in communications in its native Poland. Lojban, a more recent conlang, attempts to produce a language that allows for no ambiguity in any terms, with a hefty vocabulary and a complicated grammar structure. And Toki Pona tries to simplify the lives of its speakers by only having 120 words, more or less, with all other concepts either kept out of discussion in favor of simplicity, or made by producing monstrous compound words.

All this only serves to demonstrate the fact that students’ views of the world are broadened with additional languages, and that their ability to think can be drastically expanded with the addition of new faculties by which they can do so.

Language is the building block of society, and without understanding others, the wealth of the world’s knowledge accessible to each one of us would be lost forever.

So take pride in Seminole’s foreign language classes, and understand that language learning is an integral part of Seminole’s mission. Perhaps it’ll open up new opportunities for a new generation of students, too.