Federal Assistance for the Teaching of Spanish and Portuguese

A TEACHER of a foreign language group in the first grade was drilling on the days of the week and the words yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Which day is today ? she asked, and a confident voice replied, Today is yesterday. It is precisely because this is true, and because tomorrow will be the result of our ideas and actions today, that the Federal Government is concerned with better international understanding. Assistance to language teaching is one of the important ways in which the Government seeks to foster better international understanding. Much thought has already gone into the drafting of a plan by which the nations of the world may hope to evolve a lasting peace. Within the next few months probably the machinery will have been assembled and set in motion. Will the people look upon it as spectators who feel no direct responsibility for making it work? Or will there be a meeting of minds, a sense of common objectives, and an application of the principle that nations, like individuals, are deserving of mutual respect? That depends essentially on how well the peoples of the world understand one another, for whatever the form or structure of a world government, it is after all only the mechanism by which the will of the people may be carried out. If ignorance, suspicion, prejudice, and complacency were to characterize our national attitude, inevitably they would be reflected in our foreign policy. It is obvious that heavy responsibility for imparting knowledge and developing a cooperative spirit must rest and does rest on organized education. Every group in the profession is faced with the necessity of rethinking in terms of action the meaning of its basic purposes. Teachers are somewhat like the wife of the scientist to whom Rachel Davis DuBois refers in her book Build Together Americans.' One evening the scientist, who had been testing certain theories of the action of vitamins on white mice, gave an enthusiastic account of his discoveries. The wife's immediate reaction was, That's fine. What does it mean that I should give Johnny for supper

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