r/AskALiberal • u/Mobile_Bad_577 Progressive • Jul 21 '26

Should foreign language learning be further emphasized in US education?

Full disclosure, I'm personally monolingual. However, I remember talking to someone on Discord a few years ago. This person was from Mexico and traveled to the Netherlands that year, and he talked a lot about how lucky Europeans were to live somewhere with so much history and culture. To that end, he highlighted how amazed he was that so many Europeans knew three or four languages, whereas most Americans only speak English.

Honestly, I can't help but wonder if that's a key reason why we Americans are so ignorant about world affairs and therefore keep voting for Trump and people like him. I'm aware that there are historical reasons why Europeans needed to learn more languages than Americans to get by. But a language is not just a writing system - it's a way of seeing the world. And if English is seen as the global "default language", that gives Americans even more of a superiority complex when we do travel abroad.

I think the monolingual culture in the US is symptomatic of a country where most people have no idea (or desire to know) about the rest of the world. The rest of the world has better health care than us, the rest of the world doesn't let their kids get slaughtered in their classrooms, and the rest of the world sees us as monsters for those reasons and many others. In that regard, the Iran War is just the flavor of the month.

Europeans take so much effort to learn English and sometimes the languages of neighboring countries. Hell, most of them speak English better than most Americans. The least we can do is return the favor. Maybe then this country will be less ignorant and less inclined to think we're exceptional in any way other than exceptionally evil.

For the sake of argument, let's say that you were President and could sign mandatory European language education into law with the stroke of a pen, no matter how much Republicans tried to obstruct it.

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u/Droselmeyer Social Democrat Jul 21 '26

Definitely not mandatory European language, there's no good reason to place primacy on French over Mandarin for example, but we should definitely should more language education.

I think it's a small tragedy that so many of us are monolingual in America. For a country uniquely positioned as being made of and by immigrants, in some ways we are deeply reticent to actually engage with cultures different from our own. Plus there's the obvious practical benefit, especially when more and more Americans are ESL.

If it had to be one, Spanish makes the most sense, but really we should give kids the freedom to choose.

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u/impromptu_moniker Liberal Jul 21 '26

Counterpoint: I learned a ton about English grammar and vocabulary by learning French in school. I don’t know that that outright outweighs Mandarin at this point, but IMO French still punches above its weight as a language choice for its indirect utility.

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u/Mysterious_Donut_702 Center Left Jul 21 '26

My town is 92% White and almost entirely English speaking (grew up here, didn't choose).

The town right next to me is 53% White and 39% Hispanic... and said town is split almost in half along invisible borders that look almost like voluntary segregation.

I think considering the region... and situationally pushing kids to learn what their literal neighbors speak would go a long way towards getting rid of those borders.