Your Turn:Best defense could be language

So, I had just been catapulted from a bus ride that would have made the Indy 500 look like a challenging game of backgammon. Dizzy, confused and foreign - oh yes very, very foreign - I began to trudge toward my uncertain fate.

My eyes were beginning to blur from the strain of attempting to comprehend the street signs, which were tattooed with words that were as long as the Wabash and as impossible to pronounce as a public speaking exercise administered by the Godfather.

It was July and I was in Bajardo, Italy.

Bajardo is located on the tip of a mountaintop in the foothills of the Alps, and English is known there as the garbled sound that sometimes infiltrates their border via the radio. This is where I spent my summer as an illiterate immigrant.

It was around the time that I attempted to buy a loaf of bread, and ended up offering myself to the grocer for the low, low price of one Euro (roughly 95 cents), that I really began to wish that I could speak Italian. My ignorance enraged me. During my previous traveling experiences I had been shielded by the comfort of the English language.

Day after day, I struggled with the Italian vowel sounds. My mind began to cramp from the sentence structures. I even tortured my tongue by twisting it into positions that would have impressed a contortionist and during all of this I kept on wondering one thing.

How was I able to reach my senior year of college and still not be fluent in at least one foreign language? Was this an example of one of the main problems of a public education? And how is America's benign neglect view on language development going to effect our future as a world power?

How can we, as Americans, consider the United States a multicultural society when we are ignoring one of the most basic components of understanding our diversity? Communication. When communication breaks down, problems occur, people are offended, and often times on the worldwide stage, wars sprout from what could have been merely tiny misunderstandings.

Globalization is the "hot" word these days and it is practically impossible for a country with an isolationist policy as old as America's to do so without some major changes. Over the past 20 years our school systems have adopted multicultural curriculums. Though these efforts are an improvement they are a quick fix for the real issues that are plaguing us.

As American citizens we should be demanding better language development from our school systems. The majority of our students are not introduced to foreign languages until they are teen-agers, and even then they are not required to peruse them. Whereas most of the world begins to administer the same curriculum our high schoolers receive to their kindergartens.

Unfortunately, as is often the case in our country, money (or the lack of it, to be precise) is one of the major impediments to improving our current state of linguistic ignorance. We readily fund billions into our military to protect us, and yet do we ever ask ourselves what may be the root of all this chaos?

So maybe introducing language acquisition into our elementary schools may not create peace on earth or end world hunger or anything, but it sure might help. By taking the next step in improving communications skills with our neighbors we could stop conflicts before they expand into full out wars.

We have to be able to ask ourselves if our country can afford to remain economically and politically stagnate as the rest of the world converges. At the very least our children could have the ability to walk into a grocery store in a foreign country and order anything they desired without accidentally propositioning the owner.