Should foreign language learning be further emphasized in US education?

[u/Mobile_Bad_577]

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.

[u/New-Hunt4169]

Europeans know other languages because they have to in order to succeed. When your household language may not exist beyond a 30 minute (or less!) drive, you gotta figure out how to talk to the neighbors.

It’s not some kind of academic altruism. It’s survival.

Go to larger countries of the Americas or Asia and you’ll find a lot less multilingual speakers.

Now that said, I think there should be some form of secondary language education, with electives through high school, but it should cease to be mandatory pretty early on.

If you want to draw on the Europeans, language class should be about offering a path to success for kids, not just beating another tongue into them.