Part of what we do in education is to teach students to be fluent in languages that most people do not speak.  That may mean French conversation or French existentialism, Stanislavski or Stravinski.  At first they may seem like nonsense languages that no one can really understand, but we hope that eventually students recognize them as languages that they simply did not yet know.

Learning a language is more than simply learning different names for things we already know.  The language itself opens up new means of experiencing, knowing, and sharing.  In medicine, doctors don’t simply learn fancy Latin names to say the same things I know how to say about my body; and if I memorized the vocabulary that alone would not qualify me to remove your gall bladder.  Why is it important for people to learn the languages of the arts and humanities?

These languages, these ways of knowing, create infinite possibilities for interpreting and shaping experience.  They remind us that at best we wrestle with what is much too large and complex to be adequately viewed from one vantage point or lens.  And they teach us that the world is not set, reality is not fixed, waiting for us to find just the right labels to correctly identify all the pieces once and for all.

A few weeks ago I attended a gallery lecture featuring two guest photographers and their exhibit at the Art & Design Gallery.  I appreciate photography, but my level of appreciation is analogous to my liking the way Portuguese sounds: Recognizing the beauty of something and understanding its meanings are not the same things.  As I listened to the artists discuss the inspirations for their work and the techniques they employed I started to appreciate a whole world of meanings that just minutes before had been hidden to me.  I began to develop a sensibility for interacting with the work itself as well as for appreciating the sophistication of the artistic process.

Some people say that the world needs more communication.  If by that they mean more listening rather than just more talking, I might agree.  But if we see communication essentially as labeling experiences so that we and others use the same names to identify them, we are missing the importance of the arts and humanities.  We do not need more communication, or even more precise communication; we need more languages.  And if we need more languages, then we need more people who are multilingual.

The neighbor kids were unimpressed by the nonsense language Brian and I invented because it did not add in any way to the conversation, as it were.  In fact, our purpose was to exclude others, not to include them.  And, frankly, they all knew Brian and I were full of it.  I hope my students have a different impression of the different languages I try to speak with them now.