In the “good old days” in the United States, as in Europe, which supplied the model, anyone who went to a secondary school and college studied Latin as a matter of course. Even in the first years of this century, when a half million students were enrolled in all our public high schools, fully half of them were still studying Latin. Those days are gone, and will never return. To regret their passing is to regret both mass education and mankind's phenomenal increase in scientific knowledge. Moreover, our world has shrunk while America's role in it has grown, and lately our society has recognized the increasing relevance of studying modern foreign languages. What, then, is the future place of Latin in American education? As one who long ago was taught both Latin and Greek, I want to try to answer this question as candidly and as objectively as I can.

DURING the summer of 1963, NDEA Title VI supported seventy-nine institutes for teachers of foreign languages. Of this number, it was my pleasure to visit six, in my temporary capacity as one of twenty evaluators cooperating with the MLA, which for the first time was under contract to the Office of Education for evaluating these programs. By now all official reports have been submitted. As an erstwhile evaluator, this writer has no further connection with the Office of Education, and my present relationship to the MLA is merely that of an individual member. Although few of them are original with me, the views expressed here on the over-all future of the institute programs are, therefore, my own. They do not represent those of the Office of Education, nor do they necessarily reflect the MLA's.

When “Six Cultures” appeared as part of the MLA Reports of Surveys and Studies in the Teaching of Modern Foreign Languages in 1961, we planned to make periodic revisions and we here publish revised and updated versions of the lists in four languages. Readers interested in French and Luso-Brazilian cultures may consult the original lists in the Appendix to the MLA Selective List of Materials (New York: MLA, 1962. $1.00) or they may obtain a reprint of the “Six Cultures” article by sending 50 cents to the MLA Materials Center. We reprint here the general introduction by Lawrence Wylie, Chairman of the original committee.

Last September, PMLA carried a report by J. N. Hook, the first Coordinator of Project English, on “Project English: The First Year.”1 It is now time for a report from the second Coordinator, even as the third, John C. Gerber, assumes responsibility for the still evolving program. The Original Program Project English is a little more than two and a half years old. It is considerably different now, however, from what it was when we first heard of it in the late fall of 1961. Then, for example, we were warned that one should stress reading and writing when presenting a proposal. Literature, somehow, was suspect.

To flourish, scholarship must have at hand in copious supply the recorded materials which advance its studies. The history of scholarship is consequently in large measure a history of the diffusion of the materials for scholarly research.

The invention of printing is of course the event which most dramatically accelerated this diffusion. But in our own day microphotography has had an effect of comparable importance. Because of microfilm and the related microphotographic processes any scholar or scholarly community may now have at hand at moderate expense what was previously reserved to a few, or—even more significant—what until recently was not conveniently accessible to any scholar no matter how great his independent means nor how ancient and rich his institution. Unpublished manuscripts scattered in dozens of repositories; printed works long out of print, unprocurable and dispersed; other sources so impermanent that deterioration erases them within a generation—for all of these microphotography has provided a means of diffusion for scholarly purposes where even printing has failed, and which is in some respects even superior to printing.

This report on the study of neglected languages in United States colleges and universities in 1962–63 shows that the neglect is diminishing, with enrollments of some 17,000 in foreign languages except the “big five”: French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. In 168 colleges and universities in the United States, 68 “neglected” foreign languages are being taught in 270 departments by over a thousand teachers to more than eleven thousand students, a figure we reach by estimating that each student is enrolled in about one and a half courses in the language. The five languages in which the largest enrollments were reported are Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Norwegian.

In 1948, approximately one student out of seven in the public high schools was studying a modern foreign language; in 1962 the ratio was one to every four—2.4 million MFL enrollments in a total high school population of 9.8 million.1 Contrary to popular belief, this gain began long before the launching of the first Sputnik startled the nation into a searching examination of its educational system, particularly in science and foreign language. There has, in fact, been an annual increase in the ratio of language enrollments to total high-school enrollment from 1948 to the present day, though the rate of increase rose sharply in 1959, after Sputnik and after the passage of the National Defense Education Act of 1958.