But Proust, who spent much of his life in bed in his cork-lined room, knew better. At the time, some of the world’s biggest celebrities were explorers who navigated the globe searching for lost civilizations and new natural wonders. Take the case of the great French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922), who lived when Paris was careening from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. While this may seem like a recent phenomenon, rapid change has always been a driver for innovative thinking. With this in mind, what we need to be teaching our students is not only a specific body of skills or knowledge, but for them to have the flexibility of mind to adapt to whatever knowledge and skills are required of them at a given time. Young people today are less likely to be looking for a job than creating a job description for themselves. Indeed, there has been a tectonic shift in the world, away from having secure, long-term jobs to creating opportunities for oneself through innovation and entrepreneurship. While we can extrapolate and predict much of what the future will bring, there is an extent to which we have no idea what kinds of skills our current elementary and secondary school students will face once they enter the world as professionals. Young children today can no more fathom that world than we can contemplate life in Sherlock Holmes’s London, with its steam trains and horse-drawn carriages. I wrote programs in BASIC and designed maze games that we saved to digital tape we dialed in to early BBS (bulletin board systems) through the phone lines and listened to the electronic beeps as the modem dialed in. When I told a student in Beijing in 2011 that my first computer had 5 K of memory, he replied: “That’s impossible!” It was not only not impossible, but it was the state-of-the-art in personal computing at the time. As a child in the 1980s, I grew up in a world that had just phased out eight-track tapes we listened to albums on vinyl records and audio cassettes, and still used a mix of rotary-dial and touch-tone phones. The iPhone was released in 2007 and the iPad not until 2010-yet it’s almost unimaginable now to contemplate a world without these devices. At the time of this writing, the so-called smart phones that we take to be such an inevitable part of our social and material landscape have scarcely been with us for a decade. Indeed, perhaps the one and only constant in the world today is change. In the world we live in now, these identities and self-definitions are perpetually in a state of transformation. These differences correspond to cultural and educational background, social and economic status, and various other forms of personal and collective identity. Even beyond the obvious differences between the varieties of English (American, Canadian, Australian, Irish, Indian, etc.) that we speak, even within a single linguistic community, there may be significant differences in the terms and expressions we use or the ways in which we articulate or make meaning. The curious thing to note, of course, is that there is ultimately no such thing as strict “monolingualism.” What my ten-year-old son means by the word “awesome” is completely different from what my grandmother would understand by that term. Those of us who regularly speak and read multiple languages know that the personas we adopt in each of them may well be radically different, and that the modalities of learning and communication we employ within the different linguistic worlds we inhabit give us a unique ability to think flexibly, adapt to new situations, and see things in ways our monolingual peers are seldom able to do. And for language learners of any age, the ability to see the world from multiple perspectives is one of the marvelous gifts that learning another language can impart. These skills comprise the most critical set for students graduating into a world beyond school in which the rules are constantly changing-a world in which it is increasingly the case that, rather than going out and finding jobs, many young people must re-envision the very concept of having a “job” and create a job description for themselves which may or may not have existed a few years ago. It’s become clear that multilingualism is quite possibly the most effective lever for helping us to see the world from multiple perspectives, think in different ways, and tackle real-world problems with a variety of approaches.
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