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- Dec 15, 2012
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- Libertarian
Facilis descensus Averno;
Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
Hoc opus, hic labor est.
-- Virgil, The Aeneid
Is the fact of Trump's monolingualism a huge disservice to the American people? No. It's a small one, a very small one, but a small disservice is yet a disservice. For as much as I despise Donald Trump, for as much as I find him boorish and banal, I wouldn't fire him for being monolingual. I absolutely will ridicule him for it because, among other things, given his "to the manor born" background, it's shameful that he is, particularly in light of Trump's having asserted that he was a good student. Minimally, the American people deserve to have a very well educated POTUS.
Frankly, that expectation applied to kids of Trump's day (and social segment) and mine. My grandfather, father, I, two of my sons, my male first cousins, and my uncles were/are St. Grottlesexers. Trump attended NYMA, which is similar but with military school discipline added. We all share having so-called fancy educations. Whereas in my time (I graduated in the late '70s) and before, a modern language and Latin or Greek was required, my alma mater altered the explicit requirement for learning a classical language, making it a requirement to learn either a classical or a modern language.
I looked for NYMA's current curriculum requirements; no luck finding them. Here're the graduation requirements at Groton, St. Paul's, St. Marks, and Middlesex:
Trump had the fancy education, and shows no evidence of having had a good non-fancy education. When he's extemporizing, he doesn't even speak in complete sentences.
If going to a school like NYMA, a St. Grottlesex school, etc., the expectation of one's coming out "educated" be inapt, particularly in the '60s, then it is is/was an unfitting expectation of students attending any school. Astoundingly, Trump went only to "fancy" schools -- NYMA, Fordham, and U. Penn -- managed to graduate and, by all indications, has disabused himself of his learnings there. One'd think "intellectual osmosis" alone would have allowed him to retain at least a partial mastery of whatever language he studied at NYMA. (Hell, for as many lawsuits as he's been in, one'd think he has some smattering of Latin he could claim as a second language.)
(quoted material edited for length because of DP post length limitations)
I'm not going to argue the point about Trump's demonstrable lack of education since I agree with you completely. He may know something about business, or at least charlatanism, but strikes me as intellectually incurious, completely ignorant of history and, as you point out, probably speaks English at about a 6th grade level, if that much.
When I was speaking about Latin and Greek not being useful I was speaking more from a practical aspect of the day to day work that a President does. As a practical matter a modern president would be better off know Russian or Chinese. Herbert Hoover and his wife both spoke Chinese, he spent years there and was a student of the culture. They apparently spoke Chinese to each other in the Whitehouse when they didn't want others to know what they were speaking about.
As far as school language learning is concerned I went to high school in the late 70s and college in the early 80s. I took three years of French in high school but had no language requirement in college, I graduated from Fordham. Language has become something of a hobby and I've been self teaching myself several, Latin among them, in recent years. My experience self teaching, which has included spending hours reading about various methods to learn languages, is that modern classroom instruction, at least that which I was exposed to, is completely useless. After three years of drilling French grammar and vocabulary I couldn't speak or read anything in the language outside of prepared textbook material.