By Tom Robotham

Whenever I take stock of my life to date, I can’t help feeling a tinge of regret. I wish, for example, that I had taken music more seriously when I was younger; and I wish I had become fluent in a foreign language or two. Like most public school students, I had some exposure—in my case, two years of Spanish in high school and two years of French in college—but it was too little too late. Today, I know only a smattering of each language.

With a little more self-discipline, of course, I could have mastered French or Spanish or both. But I also blame the education system. Virtually every study ever conducted on the subject has concluded that the best time to learn another language is in elementary school, if not early childhood. And yet, most school systems ignore it, at least until middle school. Moreover, when they do teach it, they often do so with the driest of methods.

When I asked Norfolk Schools Superintendent Stephen Jones about this several years ago, he agreed with my premise. The problem, he quickly added, is that incorporating intensive foreign-language study into the elementary school curriculum would be too expensive.

No surprise there; it’s the same justification school administrators give for ignoring the arts. But foreign-language study (not to mention music and art) should be regarded as essentials—like math and science—not mere frills. Indeed, the costs of giving it short shrift, as we do now, are considerable. For one thing, the policy puts the United States at an economic disadvantage. A case in point: Several decades ago, when Chevrolet introduced the Nova in Latin America, no one at the car company could figure out why sales weren’t very brisk. Finally, someone pointed out that “No va,” in Spanish, means, “it doesn’t go.” Since then, not much has changed in our approach to foreign-language education.

There are political disadvantages as well. After the 9/11 attacks, for example, intelligence officials were alarmed to find that agents who spoke Arabic were few and far between.

For individuals, the benefits are equally significant. Fluency in a foreign language will vastly increase a person’s value in the job market, especially as our society becomes more global.

And of course, there are benefits that can’t be quantified. Studying a foreign language, as anyone with fluency will tell you, opens you up to whole new dimensions of cultural experience and new ways of thinking.

With this in mind, I was excited to learn last year that my partner here at TReehouse, Shannon Bowman, had teamed up with three other folks to launch a new foreign-language program to help fill the void.

Because I believe this is important, I asked one of Shannon’s partners in this venture, Martha M. Daas, to write a personal statement about the program. If you’d like to learn more, keep reading.

The Thinking Behind World of Words: By Martha M. Daas, Ph.D

As the Director of the Spanish Program at Old Dominion University, I have been approached time and again by parents who were interested in having their children learn Spanish. They would always ask me if I knew of a place where they could send their children to learn a language or if I knew someone who could give their children private lessons. I tried to accommodate these requests, but I never knew whether these parents were successful in finding what they were seeking for their children. This frustration, along with the desire to see my own stepdaughter learn a language at school, encouraged me, along with three colleagues, to found World of Words (WOW) Languages.

Our pilot program began in the fall of 2008 at W.H. Taylor Elementary School and has been met with incredible enthusiasm both by the Taylor parents and their children and by the Taylor teachers and administrators. The program has been so successful that we have opened it up to Larchmont Elementary this fall and hope to expand to other schools soon.

In addition to children’s programs, WOW has also begun offering classes to adult language learners. In the spring of 2009, WOW started a Spanish program at CHKD. The residents at CHKD are working toward improving their language skills for their annual service trip to Honduras. The WOW founders are proud to be able to aid the medical residents and hope that other non-profits and businesses will look to us for their language solutions.

WOW’s founders come from a varied background of Education, Marketing, and Design. I along with my ODU colleague in French, Dr. Lee Slater, have devoted our lives to language learning. Founders Shannon Bowman and Amy Preuss bring years of marketing and design experience to the school. The founders believe that Norfolk’s public school children deserve as rich a language education as private school children are given. In fact, we learned that the Norfolk Public School System had developed a plan to include language learning at the elementary school level, but has found it too expensive to implement. Our school’s dual goals of helping children develop a greater awareness of their everyday world as well as giving them a head start in acquiring language skills and a global perspective, therefore, coincide with the desires of the school system itself.

For our pilot program, which began with two Spanish classes and one French class, we looked for qualified language instructors whose enthusiasm matched our own. One of our first Spanish teachers, Adrienne Bracy, says of our classes: “It is such a privilege to be a part of the WOW program. Finally there is a program that piques the interest of young children and gives them the opportunity to become multi-lingual at a young age. “ The pilot program ran for eight weeks, with classes meeting once a week. Our second session met with even more success, which led us to add extra classes in order to accommodate the interests of the students and their parents. This fall we hope to enroll our largest numbers yet. At Taylor we are offering Spanish 1, 2, and 3 and French 1, 2, and 3. At Larchmont, the numbers of pre-enrolled students are more than encouraging and we are certain that we will be offering more than one Spanish 1 class to accommodate the demand.

In this globalized society, the need for language learning has become even more important than in the past. Yet in our country, foreign language programs can be found in only about 25 to 30 percent of all public and private elementary schools. Language study should be considered a priority, especially if we want our children to be responsible citizens of our world. We feel that our program is a positive step toward giving the children of Hampton Roads a significant academic advantage. Learning a second language also improves a child’s memory and creativity and works toward a greater sense of self-awareness and a sense of achievement. We at WOW hope that more schools in the Hampton Roads area will seize the chance to provide their students with this great opportunity.

To find out more about WOW and how it could become part of your school program, visit our website: www.wowlanguageschool.org