Speeches and transcripts

The Importance International Education a Globalized World

Alexander R. Vershbow
United States Ambassador to the Republic of Korea

Chungnam Institute of Foreign Language Education
Gongju, Chungnam Province
November 16, 2007

Director Kim Gil Hwan, thank you for your invitation to address your Institute.  I appreciate your invitation to speak to this important group of English educators and to visit your new, state-of-the-art training center.   It is appropriate that I am speaking to you during International Education Week, an annual event organized jointly by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education.  International Education Week is celebrated in over 100 countries worldwide.  This year’s theme, International Education:  Fostering Global Citizenship and Respect, is consistent with your institute’s goal of preparing English teachers and elite students to compete in an English speaking world.

Language educators like you have a critical role to play in preparing your students to be active and informed world citizens.  In today’s globalized marketplace of goods and ideas, knowledge of a foreign language is as important as reading, mathematics, and science.  Globalization drives the demand for a workforce that possesses knowledge of other countries and proficiency in a variety of languages.  New challenges to maintaining global security, such as the international war on terrorism, underscore the need for talented diplomats with communication skills and cross-cultural knowledge.  Increasing diversity in our populations, both in the United States and in Korea, calls for a broad-minded cultural and linguistic perspective.   

With these things in mind, I would like to talk to you today about the importance of international education and learning foreign languages to success in today’s globalized world.  I’d like to use some of the issues currently playing out in Northeast Asia and in our bilateral relationship to illustrate why these skills are so important, and then I’ll examine, briefly, what the United States is doing to get American students ready to participate in this fast-paced, polyglot world. 

I feel I have personal insight into this subject, as in many ways I am the product of an education that emphasized foreign languages and cross-cultural learning.  As a young high school student, I had the opportunity to study the Russian language at my school in Boston.  Through that class, I became interested in not only the Russian language but also Russia’s history, its culture, and its political system.  After two years of studying Russian, I took my first study tour to the USSR.  I spent four weeks traveling around the country, and spent two weeks in intensive language courses on the Black Sea coast.  

The exchange experience greatly influenced my academic and professional career.  At Yale University I majored in Russian and East European studies, continuing with language as well as history, political science, literature, and music.  On my second study tour to the USSR, I spent a month in all-day language courses in Leningrad and two weeks traveling around the country.  After earning a graduate degree in international relations from Columbia University, I joined the State Department as a junior diplomat, and since then my career has taken me to Russia twice, once as the Ambassador – 32 years after my first encounter with the Soviet Union as a 15 year-old high school student.

I joined the State Department with a strong command of several foreign languages, including French and German as well as Russian.  Many of my colleagues, on the other hand, took advantage of the excellent language courses offered by the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute.   Because diplomats need to understand and interact with their counterparts in every corner of the globe, the State Department has long emphasized language training and area studies.  At the Foreign Service Institute, diplomats receive instruction in the history, geography, culture, and foreign relations of the countries in which they will live and work.  

I didn’t have enough time to get much Korean language training before coming to Korea – this is, in fact, the first post at which I’ve served where I haven’t been able to speak the local language.  While I’ve mastered the most essential vocabulary – such as poktanju teo jom juseyo – every day I am thankful for the incredible skills of our Embassy interpreters, like Ms. Kim.    

Benefits of Learning Foreign Languages and Studying Abroad

As English teachers, you are well aware of the many reasons students, and their parents, think it is important to learn English.  Consider this: a quick Google web search on the words “English as a Second Language” yields almost 19 million hits.  By comparison, a search on the words “George Bush” yields barely more than half that, just over ten million. 

English is undoubtedly a crucial component to success in the global arena.  At the beginning of the new millennium, about a billion and a half people – roughly a quarter of the world’s population – spoke English.  Amazingly enough, English was the first language learned for less than a third of those people – just 425 million.  Thus, over a billion people in the world learned English as their second, third, or fourth (or perhaps even fifth?) language.    

Challenges to Our Societies in the Twenty-first Century

I think one of the most compelling reasons fueling the global rush to acquire language skills is the importance those skills play not only to individual career advancement but also to the health and survival of our societies.  In our globalizing world, technological, economic, political and social forces have changed the way we live and work.  Today we face challenges to our economic competitiveness and national security.  We are also becoming multicultural, multiracial societies due to immigration and the movement of labor forces.  To meet these challenges, we need citizens who speak foreign languages and are knowledgeable about world regions, global issues and foreign cultures.

The high stakes of competing in a global marketplace have prompted businesses to develop a more internationally literate workforce.  Several large American companies, including Proctor & Gamble, IBM and Intel, compensate employees who learn a foreign language for business purposes.  The Boeing Corporation now gives promotion incentives to employees with knowledge and experience in other cultures.  Richard Wagoner, who is now the President and CEO of General Motors, learned Portuguese while working in Brazil in order to increase his effectiveness in working with the Brazilian business community.  Douglas Taft, the former CEO of Coca-Cola, spent nearly three decades in Asia working for the company.  The cultural knowledge he acquired during that time shaped his ability to later lead the company.  Mr. Taft believed that the ability to understand other cultures was an essential skill for anyone working at Coca-Cola. 

A survey of graduates of one of America’s leading international business schools, the Thunderbird Garvin School of Management, underscores the importance of international knowledge and skills to today’s globalized business climate.  Thunderbird graduates are required to complete at least four semesters of a foreign language in order to graduate.  Over 80% of the 2,500 graduates from 1970 to 2002 reported that foreign language skills gave them a competitive advantage in the workplace.  Moreover, nearly nine in ten graduates said their knowledge of other cultures gave them a competitive edge.

U.S. trade with Asia is now double our trade with Europe.  The U.S. Trade Representative estimates that before 2010, it will exceed $1 trillion.  The Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA), when ratified by the Korean National Assembly and the U.S. Congress, is expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and lead to billions of dollars in extra foreign investment in South Korea.  Those jobs and investments will go to Koreans and Korean companies that are prepared to take advantage of working with U.S. companies and investors.  Of course, that means workers who speak English and are familiar with American culture and business practices.  It also means that employees of American companies need to know about doing business in Korea.  Those companies will have an advantage if they have Americans who can speak Korean well and know Korean culture and business practices.

The U.S.-Korea alliance began over 125 years ago, when in 1882 we signed our landmark friendship and commerce treaty.  In those days, our relationship was one-dimensional; we sought trading opportunities and guarantees of protection in a volatile region at a turbulent time.  Our relationship has, of course, become infinitely more complex and intimate throughout the last century and a half.  Today, as our national interests more and more often intersect, our countries are finding cultural sensitivity and communication skills to be of ever-greater importance, not only with each other but also with our regional partners. 

We have seen great progress in the Six Party Talks since North Korea rejoined the process a year ago; North Korea is now well on its way to fulfilling its promises made in October to disable its nuclear facilities at Yongbyon and to provide a complete declaration of all its nuclear programs by the end of this year.  This progress would not have been accomplished without the negotiators’ experience in understanding foreign cultures and languages.  Korea and the United States are now working together to explore the possibility of creating a permanent mechanism to promote regional security cooperation in Northeast Asia, building on the foundation laid by the Six Party Talks.  Such a mechanism could serve as a forum for discussing shared concerns and coming up with collective solutions to urgent problems, from the reduction of military tensions to environmental concerns to avian influenza. 

In the past fifty years, no two countries have become more culturally intertwined than South Korea and the United States.  Just a casual glance at the exercise grounds of any U.S. Military installation in Korea will bear that out; every day, Korean and American soldiers are working, training, and living together.  In fact, Korean and American troops on the Korean Peninsula may be the most culturally astute of us all, if only because they spend so much time together. 

If you want to test my theory, you’d better do it soon, because many of these military camps will soon be gone.  As part of the transformation of our alliance, we are consolidating 60 of our military camps into two regional hubs, the largest of which is the relocation of USFK headquarters from Yongsan Garrison to Pyeongtaek.  At the same time, between now and April 2012, we will be transferring wartime operational control (OPCON) from today’s Combined Forces Command, headed by a U.S. general, to the ROK military.  All these changes will make the ROK-U.S. alliance a much more balanced partnership, better equipped to meet the security challenges of the 21st century

The transformation of our alliance has inadvertently become an excellent example of the need for language and cultural skills.  Though the transformation will ultimately enhance the ability of the alliance to defend the Peninsula from any form of North Korean aggression, some Koreans mistakenly believe it could lead to a weakening of the U.S. commitment to South Korea.  In fact, while we considered these changes to be an appropriate reflection of Korea’s growing military and economic might, as well as its increasing influence on the world stage, some people mistook the plan as part of an American strategy to remove its military presence from the region.  In order to set the record straight on the issue, the governments of Korea and the United States have drawn on all their cross-cultural and linguistic skills to reinforce the truth:  The relocation of USFK and the transfer of wartime OPCON will make our alliance stronger and more worthy of political support – in both countries – for many, many years to come.     

The security challenges of the 21st century have made us all reevaluate our abilities to understand cultural information and to communicate with each other. After the events of September 11, 2001, the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies as well as the military in the United States realized that they needed employees that could translate messages gathered through intelligence. The federal government quickly realized that it had to do something about the lack of foreign language expertise. 

In response, last year President Bush launched the National Security Language Initiative to dramatically increase the number of Americans learning critical-need languages.  Those languages include Arabic, Central Asian languages, Chinese, Farsi, Hindi, Japanese, Russian, Turkish, and Korean.   Under this program, President Bush this year asked for around 45 million dollars to promote education of these critical-need languages in American schools and universities, ten million dollars to support education in critical-need languages by federal government professionals, and 26 million dollars to support academic scholarships and exchanges to promote study in critical-need languages.  As part of this initiative, 25 American university students received scholarships to attend an intensive summer Korean language institute at the Suwon campus of Kyunghee University to improve their Korean language skills last summer.  

Korea is also becoming a multicultural, multiethnic society.  As more and more workers come to Korea in search of better lives, the numbers of non-Korean speakers will rise, impacting schools, businesses, and government offices.  Since many of these new residents do not speak Korean or English, Korean businesses and companies will have to hire employees that speak the languages of the workers.  Social services providers, hospitals, libraries, government offices, and factories will need to hire bilingual, bicultural staff to assist these newcomers until they have adjusted. 

A recent report by the Japanese periodical the Yomiuri Shimbun indicates that Korea would do well to learn from Japan’s mistakes.  Since Japan began admitting ethnic-Japanese foreign nationals into the country to perform unskilled jobs in 1990, an increasing number of people from South America have moved to Japan.  The government of Japan leaves the responsibility of educating these people to the local governments.  As a result, over 22,000 students – close to a third of all foreign nationals in Japanese primary, middle and high schools – do not understand Japanese sufficiently to succeed in school.  The Japanese government announced last week that they plan to provide financial support to the local governments to employ bilingual foreign instructors, much like yourselves, to assist the students.   

In many cases, the burden of meeting the challenges of globalization will fall on the shoulders of educators like you. To have a citizenry that is knowledgeable of world regions, global issues and foreign cultures, as well as conversant in other languages, it will be necessary to strengthen our educational systems.  We will need to expand, improve, and develop foreign language and international studies education.  As former Secretary of State Colin Powell said, “To solve most of the major problems facing [us] today – from wiping out terrorism to minimizing global environmental problems to eliminating the scourge of AIDS – will require every young person to learn more about other regions, cultures and languages.”

As English teachers you are well aware of the importance of teaching foreign languages and culture.  This new facility with its English Experience Center where students can make use of their English skills in a realistic setting is a good example of the kinds of innovations that are needed.  The clinic, bank, pharmacy and post office will give students real-world experience and help them to develop the practical English skills they need to become global citizens.  The fact that you have native speaker instructors who can give your students real practice in dealing with people of other nations and cultures also adds value to the training at CIFLE. 

In conclusion, I’d like to bring us back to our celebration this week of International Education Week.  The theme of International Education Week recognizes the importance of teaching children to be responsible, respectful world citizens.  The goal is not just to compete in the globalized world but also to cooperate with citizens of other countries to solve some of the global challenges in the future, from poverty to environmental concerns, hunger and disease.  This is the challenge of our time; nothing less than global peace and prosperity hang in the balance.  Moreover, the pivotal role foreign language skills play in making these dreams a reality cannot be overemphasized.  As Nelson Mandela said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head.  If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” 

Thank you for listening and congratulations on choosing English teaching as a career.  I look forward to your questions.