According to Forbes, foreign languages are dying a slow but sure death in America. According to statistics, only 18% of Americans can speak a language other than English. Compare this to Europe where more than 56% of the population can speak languages additional to their native tongues. Why such a great disparity? To start with, elementary and secondary schools are dropping language courses from curriculums; they blame it on budget cuts. When a school is allocated a smaller budget, it is faced with the task of deciding what courses have to go. Because there hasn’t been much of an emphasis on foreign language education in America, most schools will choose to drop them from curriculums.
The drawbacks
This comes with a great downside; that ordinary Americans cannot participate at a global level because of their limitations to communicate. If language courses and learning languages from other majorities around the world was emphasized from the higher levels of leadership, more and more Americans could interact with the rest of the world in the languages that they speak. The US Secretary of Education in 2010 speaking on the topic said, “Americans need to read, speak and understand other languages.” And it isn’t just the elementary and secondary schools that are getting rid of language courses; only 50.7% required foreign language as a requirement to study a baccalaureate.
Not to study foreign languages means that people miss out on great opportunities; they cannot become diplomats, they cannot work in foreign policy, they can only rise so much in military positions and they cant even apply for well paying jobs – there are opportunities for engineers, doctors, nurses and teachers all over the world.
There have been some positive trends in some places though; in Chicago, 43 schools now offer Mandarin courses that reaches about 43,000 kids. The interesting thing about this is that most of the students are Hispanic and will therefore end up being tri-lingual. In Virginia, middle and high school students can now take Mandarin and Arabic lessons and Columbia, Yale and Cornell are developing courses that can be shared through video conferencing.
These are all great developments but more is needed. Parents need to take a more active role in ensuring that their children learn a second or third language whether or not it is offered in their school. In schools where foreign languages are not part of the timetable, there is a lot that PTA’s can do to lobby that they be included. Administrators in all kinds of educational institutions need to revisit their foreign language requirements and see how they can start to offer these languages at reduced costs.
The cost of not fixing this problem.
The cost of not doing this could have wide negative implications in the future. Americans learnt this when the Russians launched Sputnik at the height of the Cold War. That President Eisenhower then signed the National Defense Education Act is evidence as to how not learning foreign languages could cost America in so many ways.
To conclude, President Obama was right when he said that Americans should get their children to study Spanish or another second language; it is needed now more than ever.
The author is a linguist who speaks Italian, French and English and collaborates to The Language class in London.
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