The Ayres proposal was ultimately defeated 15 to 13 with all present Republicans voting for it and all Democrats, except for chairman Graham Barden of North Carolina, voting against it.

Vice-President Nixon and Congressman Charles Porter of Oregon did not agree on domestic policy and had a private conference recently on the interests of improving the Latin American good neighbor policy. Mr. Nixon had been stoned and spat upon earlier in the year in Caracas and Mr. Porter had shortly thereafter addressed a crowd of 20,000 people in Caracas and was hailed as a hero, the difference having been that Mr. Porter had campaigned vigorously against Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and against other Latin American dictators, while Mr. Nixon had gone along with the State Department policy of doing business with dictators and was photographed some time earlier in a fond embrace with dictator Trujillo.

Mr. Nixon, however, had now come out for a new American policy of discouraging dictators and appeared delighted to sit down with Mr. Porter to discuss future moves in Latin America. Mr Porter proposed that the U.S. go out of its way to encourage democratic movements by first having the President make a speech encouraging the new democratic regime in Venezuela and second by him making a speech commending the Government of Colombia for throwing out a dictator and electing a new democratic regime. The two men also discussed sending the Navy band to Latin America, which the State Department had already approved, although not having resolved how to pay for the trip. The Vice-President also liked the idea proposed by Mr. Porter of sending five delegates from every Latin American country to attend a meeting on democracy, to be held under the auspices of NYU.

David T. Helberg, Greensboro, N.C., primary school principal, discusses the experience at his school which had begun conducting classes in conversational French two years earlier, telling of the argument for teaching foreign languages in the early years of schooling. He indicates that foreign languages had been taught in the private grade schools of the country for many years and that now the trend was expanded into the public schools.

Kenneth Mildenberger, research associate, in a report for the Modern Language Association of America, had stated in 1940 that only 2,000 elementary public school children in the country were learning a foreign language. Now the number was 271,000, plus another 156,000 in the Roman Catholic elementary schools. That made the total 427,000 children presently studying a foreign language at the grade school level.

In 1952, only 89 communities had some foreign language teaching in the public elementary schools, compared with 400 cities and towns by the end of 1955. Mr. Mildenberger had gone on to say that the number of public elementary school children was already more than a third of the enrollment in modern foreign languages in the public high schools and that it was fast approaching the number of students studying modern foreign languages in the colleges and universities. Only four states had no foreign language teaching in grade school, Idaho, Mississippi, South Dakota and Rhode Island.

He asserts that two facts were primarily responsible for the trend, the first being the growing awareness that because of the country's present role in the world, more American children would need to acquire early some understanding of foreign cultures, preferably through the medium of a foreign language, and the second, being a growing awareness of something long known to educators of other countries, that young children learned to speak foreign language more easily, and with more accurate pronunciation than did older children or adults. Most of the teaching in the primary grades remained experimental and exploratory.

He posits that teaching the foreign language early before the child became too deeply set in a cultural pattern native to his area enabled the child to learn of different cultures and thus would be less likely to regard foreign cultures as odd or inferior. The teaching tended to be linguistic in showing patterns rather than the written word and vocabulary, thus unlike the teaching of English. All of the conversation in the class ought be in the foreign language, with little or no English spoken, enabling the child to learn to think in the foreign language rather than in English and then translating, with the emphasis on "acting and doing".

By not allowing written words, since no notebooks or textbooks were advocated, it was believed that there was less possibility of mispronunciation of terms, as studies had shown that the foreign language pronunciation of the elementary school child was far superior to that of the older children learning it from textbooks.

At present, children had better knowledge of countries outside the U.S. and English-speaking people than ever before through the advent of television, through newspapers, international crises and overseas servicemen. In keeping with that new concept of education, a second language could benefit children and their teachers in their regular daily studies.

Children were being eased into the foreign language rather than having it suddenly thrust upon them during adolescence when many physical and mental adjustments needed attention otherwise. With the policy in the U.S. of admission of refugees to the country becoming more lenient, permitting more Europeans to enter U.S. schools, the European children who were reluctant to come to school would now find more understanding and friendlier children in American schools with the knowledge of a second language and second culture which they had come to respect.

We tend to disagree with the premise that understanding a foreign language necessarily imparts better the culture of the foreign country where that language is native, as a culture can be studied just as well, perhaps better and more thoroughly, in one's native language, with room made for certain phrases perhaps sui generis to the culture being studied, which might stand out to enable a deeper penetration into the culture. But the culture of a given country or region of the world is understood better through a thorough understanding and inculcation of the mores, habits, environmental impacts, history, politics, governmental structure, religion, religiosity, musical heritage, art, crafts, mythology, and other such indicia of culture, not strictly dependent per se on the native language to communicate its symbology. From a thorough understanding of those basic indicia of the culture, one can glean an understanding of the human reasoning underlying that culture which might differ in some respects from one's native culture, and do so much more quickly than one would normally be able to do by studying and even becoming quite fluent in the foreign language native to that culture. Indeed, becoming fluent in the foreign language might even inhibit to some degree needed objectivity in studying the other culture.

Moreover, while it is widely known that the greater plasticity of the younger mind, not hardened in its syntactical concepts endued from the native language, such that the young mind can more easily receive without interference the foreign language syntax and semantics without having to "rearrange" one's mental concepts already formed, enables the reception of a foreign language with greater facility than after one becomes much more familiar and adept at the use of the native language, trying to teach young children a foreign language which is not otherwise practically required such as when living in a foreign country, may cause confusion of semantic concepts and actually inhibit the normal formation of logical reasoning communicated via one's native tongue either in writing or verbally.

Thus, we have a bias against such teaching in the primary grades, with the full disclosure that we were not exposed to any foreign language until junior high school, other than that gleaned from an older sibling who had taken a foreign language at that same level and by some process of inference via television and radio, later through newspapers and magazines, though television and photojournalistic magazines associate the pictures often with the foreign words to enable some rudimentary understanding of a foreign language. Our experience was that it was rather difficult to learn to speak Spanish when first we sought to learn it in the seventh grade, and it did not become measurably easier in taking it through the tenth grade. But by dint of that troublesome experience, we found Latin, in the eleventh and twelfth grades, to open new vistas of understanding of not only prior lessons in Spanish but all of the Romance languages, including our native English, and regularly utilize that two years of Latin to good advantage to this day in being able to interpret and use a wider vocabulary, as much of English is derived from Latin, as are Spanish and French, perhaps to a lesser degree, German.

Oriental languages, Arabic languages and Slavic languages are of a different character, primarily because of the different representations and constructs within their basic building blocks, the Occidental equivalent of alphabetic lettering. Nevertheless, even without the slightest understanding of those languages, one can still become reasonably adept at perceiving the underpinnings of those cultures on a mature level without prejudice or bias, through a studied understanding of the indicia of any culture, as mentioned above, from within the native tongue.

Thus we posit our counter argument to the experiment of teaching a foreign language in the primary grades. It might, indeed, translate into a star pupil vis-à-vis the other pupils by the time that student, with exposure early on to the foreign language, reaches junior high school. But it might also result in having that same student being thought of as a "brain" too easily when that student might falter when it comes to basic reasoning and logic in his or her native language. Thus, on balance, is it really good for that student to be accelerated significantly beyond one's fellow students or—setting aside the always unrealistic relativistic argument, that if all are so educated, then the difference would only be exhibited in the individual's application and quality of learning—, of those of a different generation when they were that age?

The same argument can be applied to trying to teach one's children to learn to read too early, before entering school. Getting a head-start in the race does not necessarily translate into getting ahead or being a star pupil in the long run, as an emphasis on learning to reason and solve problems in a practical sense prior to learning even to read is, we think, the sine qua non for a well-developed adult reasoning process, one not, in consequence, strictly dependent on reading of the written word, as listening to what another person says and interpreting from it either the error of the reasoning or finding the logic of the reasoning is of great practical use in adult life, where a great amount of debate is verbal rather than written, though we do not thereby diminish the significance of written debate, logic and reasoning, as the latter medium affords closer scrutiny of one's own thought processes and thus is more likely to expose logical fallacies or omissions in the reasoning process—which is why the foundation of the legal appellate process, to ferret out and hopefully correct errors at trial, is written argument and not oral argument, the latter only intended to clarify the former.

It is also wise to consider the opposing possibility by teaching a foreign language too early in terms of learning thereby appreciation of a foreign culture, that, children, being children and often given to undue hubris regarding skills acquired and at which they have become adept at an early age, might actually be led in consequence to be less understanding and empathetic with the foreign culture from which the foreign language derives and to look askance at an emigrant from it who has struggled with learning the new native language of the land to which he or she has immigrated, not realizing from personal experience that the struggle might, at least in part, be the result of that immigrant knowing their native language only too well and finding it difficult therefore to adjust to the new language, whereas the student who has struggled with learning a foreign language at an older age, in junior high or high school, after gaining some mastery of their own native language, might readily perceive the problem and not feel for the other any disdain but rather understanding and empathy for the fractured use of the new language, the younger adept never bothering, as a result of his or her own facility, to try to penetrate deeper into the foreign culture through a study of the various indicia of any culture, as aforementioned.

Again, however, our perspective is developed from our own personal experience and those who were able to speak fluently some foreign language not native to their own tongue before they were 12 years old might differ and find their experience to have been the far superior.

It is akin in nature to those children who become more or less prodigies at music and earn some level of approbation at a young age for their early exhibition of musical skill, music being a foreign language of a sort, with its mastery utilizing similar mental constructs to that of learning a foreign language, and perhaps as a result looking somewhat disdainfully at those witless haverils who have not, who cannot master musical performance, save their life on't. The adept might as a result stultify their own growth unwittingly by never seeking to venture beyond the rudimentary understanding of the art and craft of music, while another who cannot perform nevertheless achieves through time a more thorough appreciation and even understanding of the art through the auditory sense and reliance on memory of earlier struggles at performance by having to strive harder for that deeper, penetrative understanding.

A letter from a couple wonders what the common people thought about the mess in the Charlotte Police Department, indicating that they could not see why putting someone from out of the state in the position of chief or a civilian as the City Recorder's Court clerk would help anything, suggesting that someone from the existing Department be chosen as chief or at least someone from within the state. They do not want the chief to resign and were scared to think of someone taking his place. "We say let some guy who knows Charlotte and what we need take his place. Look around the Police Department and the detective division and see what you can find."