I mean the whole school I went through kept nailing in our heads how much a foreign language would benefit you. I guess this went under the noses of whoever like teaching kids to balance a checkbook.
I mean the whole school I went through kept nailing in our heads how much a foreign language would benefit you. I guess this went under the noses of whoever like teaching kids to balance a checkbook.
I think this is a matter of the microeconomics concept of “scarce resources”? It’d be lovely if everyone in the US learns at least Spanish. But school can only teach a limited number of subjects, so in the US where most people don’t need to use anything other than American English, it might be argued that it is more beneficial to spend more time on, say, STEM and history, rather than getting kids to learn Spanish/German/Chinese… I guess there are foreign language electives for that reason? They are still highly valuable after all
Besides, learning and teaching a foreign language is hard lol. China used to (I’ve heard rumors that some places changed, not 100% sure) require mandatory English education from 1st grade elementary… social issues with the English teacher expats aside, the English literacy rate in China still looks like that. There are even multilingual countries in Europe where a good number of people struggle to learn/speak the other national languages so… Even if the US wants to do it, it’s not that straightforward
the idea that learning languages is particularly difficult seems like an anglophone invention to me, english is a completely standard mandatory subject in most of the world and in many countries a lot of kids learn 2 more languages on top of that.
Here in sweden it’s 100% expected that you speak fluent swedish, english, and can make yourself somewhat understood in at least one other language (usually spanish or german, it’s no different than being expected to know maths and science.