PDF # 25 – Claude Marcel – Language as a means of mental culture and international communication
Claude Marcel’s proposal was to make the teaching of reading the priority in foreign language teaching. His main work was a two-volume study of the role of vernacular in education called Language as a Means of Mental Culture and International Communication (1853). It attempts to define a role for the teaching of languages, native and foreign, modern and classical, in the context of a far-ranging study of the nature, purpose and structure of education.
Language is culture and culture is language
These two have a complex, homologous relationship. Language is complexly intertwined with arts (they have developed together, influence one another and ultimately shape what it means to be human). In this context, ALKrober (1923) said: “So arts began when there was language, and from then on the enrichment of both means the further development of the other.”
When culture is a product of human interaction, cultural manifestations are acts of communication adopted by particular language communities. According to Rossi Landi (1973), “the entirety of the messages that we exchange with each other when we speak a certain tongue form a linguistic community, that is, the whole of society, which is understood from the point of view of speaking.” He further explains that all children share their language learn from their societies and, while learning a language, also learn their arts and develop their cognitive skills.
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