The Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne said, “To have another language is to possess a second soul.”

Like America with the Trump administration, Charlemagne of the Early Middle Ages provided a bulwark of defense and stability for what was otherwise a disintegrating West. It may seem odd to see Charlemagne, who united Western Europe, with Trump’s philosophy of “America First”; however, the Frankish emperor’s approach to education and the defense of Christian civilization against encroaching barbarism offers lessons for how the contemporary United States can promote foreign language competency aligned with Western values and communicate Western and American ideals. A curriculum for critical languages, both Western and non-Western, must teach American ideas, producing multilingual Americans who are equipped to project American ideals into the world.

Compared with students in Europe, where an average of 92 percent learn a foreign language, only 20 percent of school-aged Americans are learning another language. One 2016 study from Pew Research found that only 36 percent of Americans viewed foreign language as important to career success. Foreign language learning is most prevalent in very small geographic areas in the U.S., with New Jersey and Washington, D.C. having roughly half of their students learning another language—no surprise there.

As a liberal art, languages are more important than many skeptics of education understand. As it is, only 35 percent of American high school seniors are reading at or above a proficient level. A mastery of English is mission-critical for citizens to exercise self-governance. At a minimum, Americans need to be able and willing to read proposed laws that their legislators are planning for them, and be able to understand information about economics, taxes, and even immigration policies that affect their quality of life. A “basic” level of reading—something 32 percent of students fail to reach—does not equip young Americans to read the Constitution’s eighteenth-century English or fully understand the natural rights it protects.

Charlemagne was one of the West’s earliest education reformers. He brought scholars from Spain, England, and Italy under his protection and standardized Latin to help protect Greco-Roman learning and Christian thought at a time when Western civilization was threatened by Islamic expansion and the paganism of barbarian tribes. Charlemagne established the West’s first coherent curriculum with the trivium and quadrivium, which formalized the study of grammar, rhetoric, logic, astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Beneath the philosophy, sciences, and theology was language.  Standardized Latin made Western civilization intelligible and enabled it to talk to itself—you could say that Charlemagne helped to settle our civilization’s soul.

Today, the battle for ideas and the West’s civilizational continuity is different, even if it is no less critical. Artificial intelligence and the near-universality of English as an international language can lull Americans into thinking that foreign language learning, or even a mastery of English, is not as critical as in ages past. Americans learned Mandarin through Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms, which promote propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). France’s Alliance Française, Spain’s Instituto Cervantes, and Italy’s Società Dante Alighieri are all extensions of their home country’s cultural soft power. When I was studying Turkish abroad, there were still elements of Turkey’s Kemalist—and inaccurate—narrative about Turkish civilization originating with the Hittites. Like a soul, language carries values and worldviews. 

When examining China’s efforts to indoctrinate Americans through its Confucius Institutes, the National Association of Scholars (NAS) found that Mandarin language education is seen as a cornerstone of its “propaganda set-up.” The NAS found that the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs, the status of Hong Kong, and Tibet were sanitized to suit the CCP’s own political agenda.  When learning another language and taking on another soul, it is important to remember the soul you already have.

The U.S. needs its students to learn foreign languages. For America’s future diplomats and business leaders, learning languages such as Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic, or even Persian—for a post-theocratic Iran—would allow them not only to communicate American ideals abroad but also to understand other cultures on their own terms. Currently, however, no central foreign language curriculum exists to enable such language acquisition.

Many foreign-language immersion programs at the K-12 level in the U.S. include instruction in other subjects in the target language. Called “full immersion,” these programs teach all subjects, including math, civics, and science, in the foreign language. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s dual-language education programs offer full instruction in English and another language, such as Arabic, Armenian, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, or Spanish. Baltimore’s International Academy offers learning through Spanish, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Russian. Silicon Valley International School offers bilingual education in Chinese, French, and German. What America’s singular history and philosophy look like in Arabic, Russian, or Korean remains unanswered. A language curriculum that teaches students not only their target foreign language but also American values such as freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, property rights, faith, and sovereignty is conspicuously absent.

Making an America First language curriculum requires will and intent. Languages naturally evolve, but only to a point. Languages are always curated to communicate a country’s identity within itself and to communicate values to the outside world. Spanish as we know it today was first formalized in 1492 by Antonio de Nebrija with the publication of the Gramática de la Lengua Castellana, the language’s first formalized grammatical work. It was presented to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in the same year Columbus sailed to the Americas, marking the beginning of Spain’s rise as a hegemonic power. Languages can revive just as much as they can organize. Modern Hebrew was cultivated from its ancient predecessor by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in the 1880s. Modern Hebrew drew on Arabic, German, Russian, and French to fill linguistic gaps and empower what had been only a religious and liturgical language, enabling it for the modern world.

Language ultimately reflects a culture’s soul in the form of its values and identity. Language is intimate to the individual because it gives our emotions the means to move from the confines of our own psyches to others who are beyond us. Language is more important to revitalizing the West and preserving America than most people may realize. Christopher Columbus may have been an Italian from Genoa, but he preferred Spanish as the language of the culture he adopted. Indeed, Columbus wrote nearly all of his letters in Spanish, even when writing to his family in Italy. Beyond identity, Columbus proved to be Spain’s most consequential immigrant in world history. Columbus began his life in Italy, but his soul, as evidenced by his writing and career, was arguably Spanish.

Western civilization is a theme of our era. The Trump administration has made Western civilization not just a political thesis, but a social and spiritual one. At the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio called for the creation of a “new Western century” aimed at economic transformation. 

Rubio noted that Western civilization is “forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture heritage, [and] language.” Rubio’s acknowledgement of the importance of language is more critical than many realize. You cannot fully understand Western civilization without its classical and modern languages. Classical Greek, Latin, and Hebrew are more than relics of the West’s past. Knowledge of Latin makes for better attorneys, just as Greek makes for better doctors and scientists. You cannot fully unlock the mysteries and appreciate the hard revelations of the Bible without knowing Hebrew. Reading the word of God in Hebrew, reading Paul or Aristotle in Greek, and praying in Latin or Hebrew feel different for a reason. Reading the soul of the West in its original languages puts you closer to the essence of these ideas.

Charlemagne understood this and strove to preserve Latin for a reason. The assimilation of barbarian groups indeed made languages like French, Spanish, and Portuguese possible. Just as language is critical to a civilization’s survival, assimilation is just as vital. Just as illegal immigrant truckers who cannot read road signs in English are resulting in disaster, immigrants cannot understand the importance of the Declaration of Independence or the importance of natural rights without reading the English in which they were originally written.

The importance of language is deeper than the liberal arts alone. Neuroscience shows language differences affect aspects of life as elemental as our sense of time and even our impulses. How you learn language and the languages you use to organize your thoughts matter. For America to remain the predominant power in the twenty-first century and a core of Western civilization, language curricula that teach American values within target foreign languages and alongside a mastery of English are more important than people realize.

This is a novel idea, but one whose time has come for educators and funders willing to create it.