ABSTRACT
Teachers of modern languages in British schools talk quite frequently about methods, but rarely about values. This is not surprising if one considers the social character of any subject in a curriculum. The social cohesiveness of language teachers is reinforced by the predominance of graduates in this area, by the experience which most of those graduates share of a period spent abroad, and by the supposedly esoteric nature of their skills. Arguments between 'reformers' and 'translators' can be traced through the early numbers of Modern Language Teaching and Modern Languages. Although the reformers seemed to carry the intellectual argument it seems that the translators came to dominate school practice. Success in learning greater values is presumably judged by the extent to which the learner becomes more like the teacher. The learner may soon stop learning the flute, but the experience of having started is a permanent enrichment of his or her internalized picture of music.
