[Originally posted on goofyblog 2.27.07]
In many schools throughout the world, kids are routinely taught one or more languages. The last time I was in London, my UK friend recommended I go to Amsterdam partly because as she said the Dutch all speak English fluently as well as their own language. She was right and most also had fluency in German and French as well.
The same goes for the Germans and Africans I’ve met here in New York. They speak good English and usually know conversational French at the least, because language learning is mandatory and children learn 2nd & 3rd languages most easily before 12 years old.
We have the 5th largest Spanish speaking population in the world (after, starting from the largest, Mexico, Spain, Argentina and Colombia). Why aren’t our kids being taught at least Spanish, that being the 2nd most spoken language in the Western hemisphere?
A recent article by Philip Slater says in part:
In many schools throughout the world, kids are routinely taught one or more languages. The last time I was in London, my UK friend recommended I go to Amsterdam partly because as she said the Dutch all speak English fluently as well as their own language. She was right and most also had fluency in German and French as well.
The same goes for the Germans and Africans I’ve met here in New York. They speak good English and usually know conversational French at the least, because language learning is mandatory and children learn 2nd & 3rd languages most easily before 12 years old.
We have the 5th largest Spanish speaking population in the world (after, starting from the largest, Mexico, Spain, Argentina and Colombia). Why aren’t our kids being taught at least Spanish, that being the 2nd most spoken language in the Western hemisphere?
A recent article by Philip Slater says in part:
A Spanish pilot last week foiled a hijacker by giving the Arabic and Spanish-speaking passengers instructions in French. It’s lucky the passengers weren’t Americans. They probably wouldn’t have had a clue what he was saying. Americans may be the most linguistically deficient people in the world. Even poor people in Third World countries often speak two or three languages, while we have ‘English only’ laws to protect us from being confronted with our own ignorance.For more about this, see Cynthia Tucker’s Foreign languages should be learned, not limited here.
Suspicion of anything outside our borders is contributing to our economic and cultural decline. We used to be number one in education, technology, and science. But in just a few years, thanks to the xenophobia of the Bush administration and its supporters, we’ve fallen behind much of Europe and Asia. Twenty years ago the U.S. ranked first in the world in percentage of both college degrees and high school diplomas. Today we’ve slipped to 7th and 9th respectively. In 1970 more than half of the world’s science and engineering doctorates came from U.S. universities. By 2001 the European Union granted 40% more than the United States.
China now has four times as many engineers as the United States–it used to have one-sixth. The United States is down to 14th in science graduates–partly because fundamentalism has made the American South abysmally ignorant in geology, biology, and astronomy. Foreign student applications to study in the U.S. are half what they were, with the UK and Germany picking up the slack. We’re far behind Asians in math literacy. In 2000 we were number one in broadband Internet access. Now we’re 16th. In 2000 we produced 40% of the world’s telecom equipment, now only 21%. We now rank 42nd in the percentage of the population with cell phones. Once the world’s technological and educational leader, we’re becoming an also-ran.
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