Programming As A Foreign Language?

[Welf]

On that note, removing the requirement could well lead to a net improvement for language learning, since it would help weed out the students who flat out don't want to be there and have no interest in the subject.

Isn't school supposed to challenge you and teach you stuff you otherwise wouldn't have touched? Those pupils are 10 to 13 years old, not an age where you already should close several ways of how someone can develop.
At that age I sucked at English and would have gotten rid of it if I could have. If I could have I would have lost a lot. What I regret most of my school years was that I took Latin for an easy grade instead of French or Spain.

[LaCroix]

Well okay, but that means what exactly? No one is saying that it can't be done or that foreign languages can't be taught well. But Americans aren't likely to stop being shit at learning foreign languages anytime soon, and changing that would take a whole lot of reforms and cultural changes that just aren't going to be feasible anytime soon.

For instance, we start teaching the first foreign language at age 6. Yes, at first grade. Starting that early, children adopt very easily. We used to start at 5th grade, but that was deemed insufficient, so we changed that. Quite simple reform, lot's if impact.

[Ralin]

Isn't school supposed to challenge you and teach you stuff you otherwise wouldn't have touched? Those pupils are 10 to 13 years old, not an age where you already should close several ways of how someone can develop.
At that age I sucked at English and would have gotten rid of it if I could have. If I could have I would have lost a lot. What I regret most of my school years was that I took Latin for an easy grade instead of French or Spain.

Well yes, but again, in the vast majority of cases it's not working. Students bullshit through the curriculum for a few years memorizing the bare minimum to pass and graduate without any usable ability in the target language. There are a number of reasons why that is the case and none of them seem likely to change. I'm not saying we shouldn't give kids the opportunity, but given the way things are set up doesn't it make more sense to let them learn something they maybe parley or develop into a livelihood instead pushing them into a curriculum that most of them aren't going to learn and aren't ever going to benefit from?

For instance, we start teaching the first foreign language at age 6. Yes, at first grade. Starting that early, children adopt very easily. We used to start at 5th grade, but that was deemed insufficient, so we changed that. Quite simple reform, lot's if impact.

Sure, and my students in China had been studying English since primary school. But the political will to do that just does not exist in most of America, and I don't see that changing.

[Broomstick]

Well yes, but again, in the vast majority of cases it's not working. Students bullshit through the curriculum for a few years memorizing the bare minimum to pass and graduate without any usable ability in the target language. There are a number of reasons why that is the case and none of them seem likely to change. I'm not saying we shouldn't give kids the opportunity, but given the way things are set up doesn't it make more sense to let them learn something they maybe parley or develop into a livelihood instead pushing them into a curriculum that most of them aren't going to learn and aren't ever going to benefit from?

And.... how do you make that determination?

And with that reasoning why bother to teach history, social sciences, or really anything other than basic reading, writing, and math? OMG! Expose kids to something that might not be 100% useful down the road? Something that won't have a guaranteed financial payoff? Are you NUTS?

Learning a second language - a real language, not a "programming language", but an actual human language - impacts the brain, just as exposing a kid to music, art, literature, sports requiring hand-eye coordination, and a variety of other stimuli promotes brain development. This focus solely on "practical" subjects with an implied guaranteed payout down the line does not result in healthy, well-rounded human beings.

[Ralin]

And.... how do you make that determination?

And with that reasoning why bother to teach history, social sciences, or really anything other than basic reading, writing, and math? OMG! Expose kids to something that might not be 100% useful down the road? Something that won't have a guaranteed financial payoff? Are you NUTS?

Learning a second language - a real language, not a "programming language", but an actual human language - impacts the brain, just as exposing a kid to music, art, literature, sports requiring hand-eye coordination, and a variety of other stimuli promotes brain development. This focus solely on "practical" subjects with an implied guaranteed payout down the line does not result in healthy, well-rounded human beings.

Sure, if they learn a second language. I'm seeing plenty of people passing through language classes and very few of them coming out knowing a foreign language, even at the college level. Learning a language is harder than learning history or social sciences. It's a skill, and it's not one that most American schools are well set up to facilitate learning, and not one that most American students have a foundation to build on, or which our society generally rewards or encourages very well.

If things could be changed so that a decent number of people who take languages in high school could be expected to graduate knowing them to a good degree I'd be all for it. And I know there are ways of changing the system to make it so that they would, but those sorts of reforms seem really unlikely to be implemented on anything other than a local scale in the US. And while I personally have benefited plenty from learning a foreign language and wish I'd been able to do so at a younger age it is pretty low on the list of the many, many things that are wrong with education in the US.

[Broomstick]

Define "learning a language well"

Does it mean complete fluency with no accent? Then most Europeans never learn a foreign language well. Does it mean ability to read at an arbitrary level? Hold a conversation? Ask where the toilet is even in grammatically poor phrases?

Beyond that, though, a LOT of what a person studies early in life is forgotten by 25 or 50. That does not mean there was no benefit to the exposure. Studying certain topics, even if never "mastered", have been proven by technology like MRI's to affect how the brain functions overall, and studying pretty much anything is going to result in more connections in the brain, more activity in and between parts of the brain, and seems associated with better academic performance in general. Is it a huge leap? No. Is it the only way to achieve these goals? Well... if you're talking about general brain stimulation no, there are lots of ways to promote that. If you're talking about improving language abilities... it's one of the better ways of going about it. The beauty of it is that you don't seem to need fluency in the second language to derive some benefits from language study.

The other bonus is that early exposure to a foreign language makes acquiring one later in life easier. So, if nothing else, it helps keep a kid's options open for later on should learning a language become a good idea.

[Zaune]

So what, you want to strike foreign languages from the curriculum entirely because improving the syllabus is too much hard work?

[StandingInFire]

... in the vast majority of cases it's not working. Students bullshit through the curriculum for a few years memorizing the bare minimum to pass and graduate without any usable ability in the target language...

^
That's the truth, argue with it what you will but when I moved to Canada from Germany (grade 5) I managed to get ~65%-75% in french class all the way to grade 9 or 10 (don't recall the exact last year I was forced to take french classes its been a while now) and I don't know any french (the only sentence I payed an real attention to learning was the sentence "I don't know how to speak french" in french). And from my experience the same can be said for at least 50% of the class. So that's a good 5 years of class's that could have been spent on something useful. And before you say that would be my third language I would only count my self 1/2 proficient in German (I can understand when people speak it but that's about it), my brain wasn't setup with multiple languages in mind.

If maybe there was a choice of the second language more people would have tried but forcing people to learn a specific second language doesn't work, enough people struggle with the first.

Now the same can be said for computer languages however, even at the University level [mandatory programming class] I would say ~75% of the people in class I would never want to code anything for me (and we had to code a basic operating system so not entry level courses) in any group project [where I didn't get to pick my group members] I spent more time fixing other peoples code then it would take for me to code it in the first place.

So in conclusion, I think counting "proficiency" in a programming language would be just as valuable as "proficiency" in a normal language. You can't teach everyone the same things and expect the same result people are good at different things allowing people the choice to learn and become good at things that actually interest them is far more valuable imo.

[Wing Commander MAD]

Learning a second language - a real language, not a "programming language", but an actual human language - impacts the brain, just as exposing a kid to music, art, literature, sports requiring hand-eye coordination, and a variety of other stimuli promotes brain development. This focus solely on "practical" subjects with an implied guaranteed payout down the line does not result in healthy, well-rounded human beings.

The term you're looking for is natural language, versus an artificial language such as Esperanto or any of the numerous formal languages used in mathematics, science, and logic. Keep in mind exposing a child to an artificial language will also stimulate the brain in positive ways like the stimuli you mentioned. In fact, you mention exposing a child to music, which itself is a formal language, as beneficial and if memory serves there is a fairly high correlation between musical talent and mathematical aptitude. That shouldn't be surprising given they use if not the same regions of the brain, then overlapping portions of it if my memory serves me well. Programming language courses are not a substitute for foreign language courses, that I will agree with, but they can be far from just another vocational skill as well.

[Broomstick]

I disagree that Esperanto wouldn't provide similar stimulation to a natural language as it is complex and versatile enough to provide that stimulation. Various Sign languages would also serve the same purpose. Esperanto and variations on Sign, for all that they are considered artificial constructs, are still full human languages.

This is distinct from programming languages which, while a useful tool, are not something that a human would ever use for daily expression with other humans.

[Wing Commander MAD]

I disagree that Esperanto wouldn't provide similar stimulation to a natural language as it is complex and versatile enough to provide that stimulation. Various Sign languages would also serve the same purpose. Esperanto and variations on Sign, for all that they are considered artificial constructs, are still full human languages.

This is distinct from programming languages which, while a useful tool, are not something that a human would ever use for daily expression with other humans.

I agree it would and wasn't trying to say otherwise. I was merely pointing out the actual term for "real language". I did try to differentiate formal languages, which are none the less quite real languages(in that they have grammer, syntax, semantics, and symbols) for a reason.

[hongi]

What would happen if American children did not have to learn a foreign language in school?

[Kon_El]

Any American whose biggest concern is having difficulty communicating when they take a vacation to France or the Caribbean is doing a hell of a lot better than most.

The distance most Americans would have to travel before not speaking any language other than English would be a problem is a huge reason most don't see the point. A European who only speaks one language can't expect to travel several hundred miles in any direction and still be able to converse with whoever they meet. In a large chunk of the U.S. that is the norm.

[Broomstick]

What would happen if American children did not have to learn a foreign language in school?

I don't think that's a universal requirement in the US even today. So, basically, "nothing". At least, nothing that isn't already happening.

And Kon_El... an American can travel a couple thousand miles and still be where English is the primary if not only language.

[Zixinus]

This is something that I keep seeing popping up, especially when the subject is English vs pretty much all other languages.

The main reason people who only speak English argue against foreign languages, is that their language is the lingua franca of the world right now. That, and I have read about how people from the USA actually oppose learning a secondary language. Immigrants often feel that they will disadvantage their children by having to master two languages rather than just one, or even a prejudice against people who do know two languages. There was even a study that concluded that bilinguals had less intelligence, only to turn out that was because they picked a poor, uneducated minority for comparison. Apparently, you either must learn English or not be worth communicating with.

The thing is, the question becomes ridiculous if you ask it in a different way: you are German, and should most German children learn English (or French or Spanish or even Chinese) or C++? Should a Native American tribe school teach their native (non-English) language or have children learn Java? The question becomes as nonsensical as it truly is.

The answer is that you teach both, prioritizing actual language above programming. Why? Because French will still be mostly French 10 or even 50 years from now. Programming language? The only programming language I ever had the opportunity to learn was Pascal (which, I believe, is not used anymore except at places where people are stuck with ancient hardware) and maybe HTML (which, while useful, can be entirely replaced with a web editor and html webpages are considered amateur). If I had bothered going through learning either, I'd have two useless languages to my name. Meanwhile, almost any desk job in the country asks for foreign language credentials, either German or English. German companies expect their employees to speak German.
I have not learned enough about the history of programming, but I believe it is safe to say that new programming languages keep popping up and old ones go away. Unless you decide to become an IT technician of some kind, the coding you learned is going to be MORE useless than an actual language.

The thing is, learning a foreign language (and I refuse to call programming languages to be actual languages in this discussion) will open up a world to you. You won't just open doors to literature, films and other media, but other people and other places! You have no idea how much your perspective can broaden with people speaking to other languages, to experience other cultures. Coming to a non-English country and expecting others to know English makes you a foreigner, a tolerated tourist or clueless boss. Speaking their language can allow you to actually be in another country, to truly begin understanding what's going on around you.

Here's an example: converting Mormons. Here, they host free English lessons (relatively free of religion) as part of their attempts at conversion. However, all the missionaries here make a strong effort to learn Hungarian. Why? Because if they genuinely expected everyone to just know English, they would never hope to get converts.

And the thing is, and this is partly addressing Kon_El's point, sure, you can survive almost anywhere because English is a lingua franca. An American would have to travel far to get someplace where he HAS to know another language to survive. But what if you want to do more? What if you want to be part of the local community, be part of the local culture, work there? The USA is a country made by immigrants, many of which still speak their languages. There are patches of bilingualism all over the country, with bilingual communities. There are increasing number of Spanish speakers and Spanish-speaking people. There are some states that are officially bilingual.

[Gaidin]

I have not learned enough about the history of programming, but I believe it is safe to say that new programming languages keep popping up and old ones go away. Unless you decide to become an IT technician of some kind, the coding you learned is going to be MORE useless than an actual language.

Aside:
As crazy as this thread is, just for the concept of what they're proposing, the class in college that taught my first programming language had me hating it because it focused more on programming in the lectures than on the language for what you describe here anyway. The assignments were somewhat painful because I had to spend half the time on them translating from 'concept' to actually getting the programs to work. But in the long run it was better anyway.

[Simon_Jester]

I have seriously mixed feelings about this. I mean, it's great that schools are starting to raise their game on IT training; it's a pretty damn depressing state of affairs if employers are having to bring people in from overseas because of a lack of qualified local applicants when unemployment's officially around 7% and probably higher in reality.

And yet... Well, I'm just not massively comfortable with the idea of sidelining foreign languages because they're not so easy to monetise. Only being able to speak one language cripples your ability to live or work outside the country you're born in and severely limits your ability to so much as take an overseas vacation, and I don't think that's healthy for a country.

Honestly, I think this decision is reasonable as one of multiple alternatives. Computer programming is not necessarily an easy subject; it requires logic, analytical thought, and the ability to learn a grammar more arcane and strange than anything in Spanish or French (probably the languages that make up 95% or more of all students taking foreign language in Louisiana).

While it is desirable that students learn to speak Spanish or French, it is also very much desirable that they learn to think logically, examine their own work carefully for minor flaws (debugging), and understand how machines think and behave.

If programming counts as a foreign language then plumbing or carpentry should as well. I'm not saying it's not a useful skill to have, but understanding programming languages is having a skill you can use to build something, not communicate with other people.

I think the point here is that unlike plumbing or carpentry, programming actually does require you to do pretty much what you do when learning a foreign language. There are many terms with specific meanings you must learn. There is a (very complex and error-intolerant) grammar you MUST follow to make yourself understood. A student who succeeds in a rigorous programming course has, in my opinion, shown that they are just as respectable as someone who succeeds in a rigorous foreign language course.

I would rather have kids take both- I did myself- but I think there is at least some logic to calling C++ a 'language.'

That is nonsense. About 20% of the world's population speaks English. Do you really think that not adding another 3% by learning French is going to cripple your ability to travel?

It bloody well does if you want to see the bits of a country that aren't specifically set up to cater to tourists.

Which is more important: computer literacy or ability to function as a tourist? Remember that we have in this country a very real concern about whether people can afford to travel overseas, because they don't have adequate jobs... which this addresses.

No, it cripples your ability to see the bits of France that aren't set up to cater to tourists. Unless you're going to learn another dozen languages on top of that, you've only opened up a marginally larger portion of the world.

That could certainly be of use, but that's a question of learning the right foreign language, not a foreign language.

French is spoken by 110 million speakers worldwide as native language and 190 million as second language. It's the or one official language in 25 countries.
And if you speak French, it gives access to French films, science, literature in their original. It gives you access to a new culture and new ideas. And that is much, much more useful than learning an if-loop.
Also, it's not like you can't have both.

Actually, that doesn't undermine his point.

As an English native-speaker I can communicate with about 20% of humanity. Learning French lets me talk to another, oh... 2-3%. Learning French is NOT necessarily a more productive use of my time. I mean, if we want to argue the numbers, Spanish is so much more likely to be used by an American than French is that we should be turning our 'foreign language' requirement into a 'Spanish' requirement.

But then people would be unhappy because we're marginalizing all other languages... which, come to think of it, is exactly what is now being said against classing C++ as a language.

So I don't think we should make the 'utility' argument or the 'lets you communicate with more people' argument. Optimizing for that just leads to mandatory Spanish classes for all, not a broader "foreign language requirement."

Also, it's not like you can't have both.

^ This.

Arguably, being a polyglot has been the more common state for humanity since we all came out of Africa.

This is nothing more than a penny-pinching dodge to avoid paying for teachers for actual living languages other than English. It's yet another example valuing STEM to the exclusion of everything else from language to physical activity. To clarify: while I would be the first to argue that STEM topics are a necessity in today's world they are not the only thing we should be teaching our children.

I find it very unlikely that all students will take programming instead of Spanish or French. Many children would prefer Spanish or French over computer programming.

Indeed, I would argue that classing programming as a foreign language is at least a half-step in the direction of vocational education, because it provides a useful career skill for children who are in many cases frustrated by "when will I use this?" They have no more intention of using French than they have of using the Pythagorean Theorem; with programming you can at least give them the easy answer of "you will need this to get hired at a good job."

Worse yet, the US does a piss-poor job of teaching STEM despite neglecting nearly everything else in the interest of promoting it.

Literally every state in the union is scrambling on this issue; the main problems come from perverse incentives that punish states for making some important good choices. Remove those incentives and we would BOTH have more time for non-STEM subjects AND be able to teach STEM more effectively to those with aptitude for it.

But simply demanding that everyone graduate Spanish isn't going to change that.

Frankly, at this point I'd be in favor making a study of Spanish mandatory in the US given the increasing Hispanic population and the proximity of Latin America. This will make some folks scream but to me it's a reflection of reality.

This is quite logical- but there are only so many hours in a school day, and good luck forcing the average student to learn three languages, only one of which is spoken in or near their home by people they actually know. So you'd be excluding all other languages from the curriculum for most students, with a handful of exceptions actually willing to volunteer to learn three languages at once.

I sort of agree with Grumman's point. After English, Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic, learning any additional languages only nets you a very small percentage of increased communication potential.

I think not knowing Spanish in the United States is pretty crippling, however, considering how many people speak Spanish here. But I guess it depends where in the US you live.

Outside of areas where they are large minorities of the population, you can live quite conveniently without a word of Spanish. It is at most inconvenient because of the times when you can't make yourself understood to a person who speaks little English of their own.

In places where Spanish is spoken almost exclusively by, say, 20-30% of the population you might need Spanish... but that is not a common condition over the US as a whole.

French is spoken by 110 million speakers worldwide as native language and 190 million as second language. It's the or one official language in 25 countries.
And if you speak French, it gives access to French films, science, literature in their original. It gives you access to a new culture and new ideas.

Plus, if you have achieved reasonable fluency in one Romance language, you have a good head start on being able to make yourself understood in the others.

In any case, I don't much mind which modern languages are taught in schools. I just think it's important that we strive to ensure that everyone should leave school with at least a rudimentary grasp of a language beside their native one, simply because it gives them more choice about what to do with their lives.

So does programming. Or, hell, basic computer literacy courses like "this is how to use Excel."

I WANT everyone to learn a foreign language, but I also want students to have some degree of flexibility and choice. There are literally tens of millions of people in this country who would be at least as well off, if not more so, if they'd had the choice of saying "I want to learn C++" rather than learning Spanish or French.

IIRC learning two languages at an early age has other cognitive benefits, so foreign languages are not useless no matter how you cut it even if you can't see yourself actually travelling to these countries.

How early is 'early?' We're talking about a high school curriculum here.

Saying that there are not enough opportunities in your area or that you don't have the money for it is understandable, but to me it's preposterous to just outright dismiss their usefulness.

I don't dismiss it, but my point is that there are other things out there which might reasonably be made options. The district is not proposing to abolish Spanish or French.

I've never understood the obsession with french as THE foreign language taught in schools, it's not as widely spoken as many other languages but in most british state schools it is the only foreign language you get taught for 3 years, at which point you drop it and do something useful like business studies, especially if you live in wales where your education is already crippled due to the requirement to do all your subjects in Welsh including the sciences until you get to sixth form college, at which point you have to relearn all the terminology in english so as to be able to study at university.

In America, it's Spanish or French unless you go to a high-end high school (I did; a friend of mine satisfied his foreign language requirement in Latin)

This.

And Grumman, 20% of the world's population speaks English? A good number of those people have such poor skills that you will have enormous difficulty in interacting with them despite their nominal (and often it is just that, in name only) proficiency.

The average high school graduate does not retain full fluency in the language they 'learned,' if they ever had it. I mean, I got Spanish in high school, but my ability to make myself understood verbally in Spanish is basically nothing. My trying to speak Spanish to native Spanish-speakers with only rudimentary English will NOT help.

To have full fluency in Spanish I would have needed one or two more years of it in high school, followed by a steady stream of encounters with Spanish-speakers to keep up my fluency in the ten years since my graduation. I learned to do other things with that time, and I don't regret it... but it means that I'm basically restricted to English and a near-useless smattering of Spanish and German, when it comes to making myself understood.

if you want to require several years of foreign language, in each of multiple languages, in school... fine. It might even be a good idea. But there are opportunity costs. Students will come out less proficient in mathematics, the sciences, historical literacy, and the ability to make themselves understood in their native tongue.

Learning other languages makes learning more linguistic skills and retaining all kinds of things easier, because you need to seriously exercise your brain in order to do so. Once you learn one or two additional languages, you begin to see connections between other languages (even unrelated ones) where there are similarities. Learning new languages also allows you to understand cultural issues, because it is often impossible to do so unless you speak at least some of their language.

Yes. I approve of learning new languages. On the other hand, I think at least allowing children to graduate from high school without foreign language credit might... not be unreasonable, shall we say.

Furthermore, if there is a job on offer where you might run into foreigners and have to deal with them, all other things being equal, who is going to get hired, the person who speaks only one language, or the one who speaks two? Remember that the foreigner might not speak your language, but might speak the one you have as a second language.

This argument applies better if your second language is C++ than if it's Spanish or French, at least in America.

Your needs may not be the same as ours.

While we're at it, I'd support the same decision in, say, Russia or China or any other large industrialized nation. If your nation is small and you have a LOT of routine dealings with foreigners (as in Finland), foreign language needs to be a larger fraction of your nation's curricula than if your population is large and much of your population NEVER deals with foreigners (as in the US or China).

The proposal to use programming as a foreign language instead of as a crafts skill is nothing more than chest-beating "Ruh-duh, we don't need no stinking furriner languages!" bullshit.

NO, it is not.

The arguments are:
1) Many of the skills required to learn to program are comparable to those required to learn a foreign language. Or are different skills, but of comparable difficulty and rigor.
2) As a strictly practical matter, the students' education MIGHT, in some cases, be better served by programming lessons than by foreign language lessons. Foreign languages remain offered, but a student who simply cannot seem to get the hang of verb conjugation in a foreign tongue and who wants to learn to program computers should at least have a fair chance to graduate from high school.

This is not chest-beating.

Well yes, but again, in the vast majority of cases it's not working. Students bullshit through the curriculum for a few years memorizing the bare minimum to pass and graduate without any usable ability in the target language. There are a number of reasons why that is the case and none of them seem likely to change. I'm not saying we shouldn't give kids the opportunity, but given the way things are set up doesn't it make more sense to let them learn something they maybe parley or develop into a livelihood instead pushing them into a curriculum that most of them aren't going to learn and aren't ever going to benefit from?

And.... how do you make that determination?

And with that reasoning why bother to teach history, social sciences, or really anything other than basic reading, writing, and math? OMG! Expose kids to something that might not be 100% useful down the road? Something that won't have a guaranteed financial payoff? Are you NUTS?

Learning a second language - a real language, not a "programming language", but an actual human language - impacts the brain, just as exposing a kid to music, art, literature, sports requiring hand-eye coordination, and a variety of other stimuli promotes brain development. This focus solely on "practical" subjects with an implied guaranteed payout down the line does not result in healthy, well-rounded human beings.

Broomstick, please don't turn this into a slippery slope argument.

There are a host of things American schools can and should teach. We need national political will to support teaching those things, teaching them properly, and dealing appropriately with students who are grossly unqualified to learn them properly.

Until the will to do all those things comes into place, school districts are trapped and scrambling to SOMEHOW get the kids out the doors with diplomas that actually mean something and give them a fighting chance of adult success.

Do I approve of everything being done in the name of that? No, no I do not.

Does that mean that I freak out and go into denial that there's an issue just because American public schools (surprise!) do not have and have never had the same kind of foreign language programs as European public schools?

So what, you want to strike foreign languages from the curriculum entirely because improving the syllabus is too much hard work?

No, he wants to allow students to graduate from high school without taking a foreign language class.

The argument is that "can speak a foreign language" is not the same order of qualification as "can read and write well enough to be in the 10th percentile or higher of society" or "can cope with similar triangles and quadratic equations if pressured." We might say that a person has attained at least a basic, functional education given the needs of actual American students even if they have not taken a foreign language class.

What would happen if American children did not have to learn a foreign language in school?

I don't think that's a universal requirement in the US even today. So, basically, "nothing". At least, nothing that isn't already happening.

And Kon_El... an American can travel a couple thousand miles and still be where English is the primary if not only language.

In that case, why oppose this change to the Louisiana graduation requirements in the first place?

I don't think anyone is arguing that actually mastering foreign languages is desirable and good for a child's development. But experience in Europe, with European schools, may not carry over perfectly to experience in the US, which is different geographically and has a wide range of interlocking problems that undermine its schools' performance.

This is something that I keep seeing popping up, especially when the subject is English vs pretty much all other languages.

The main reason people who only speak English argue against foreign languages, is that their language is the lingua franca of the world right now. That, and I have read about how people from the USA actually oppose learning a secondary language. Immigrants often feel that they will disadvantage their children by having to master two languages rather than just one, or even a prejudice against people who do know two languages. There was even a study that concluded that bilinguals had less intelligence, only to turn out that was because they picked a poor, uneducated minority for comparison. Apparently, you either must learn English or not be worth communicating with.

The thing is, the question becomes ridiculous if you ask it in a different way: you are German, and should most German children learn English (or French or Spanish or even Chinese) or C++? Should a Native American tribe school teach their native (non-English) language or have children learn Java? The question becomes as nonsensical as it truly is.

If you are German, learning C++ might actually be a better choice. For a Native American tribe, learning their native language is key to the preservation of their own group identity, giving them an unusual reason to learn it.

The answer is that you teach both, prioritizing actual language above programming. Why? Because French will still be mostly French 10 or even 50 years from now. Programming language? The only programming language I ever had the opportunity to learn was Pascal (which, I believe, is not used anymore except at places where people are stuck with ancient hardware) and maybe HTML (which, while useful, can be entirely replaced with a web editor and html webpages are considered amateur). If I had bothered going through learning either, I'd have two useless languages to my name. Meanwhile, almost any desk job in the country asks for foreign language credentials, either German or English. German companies expect their employees to speak German.

American companies expect their employees to speak English, and usually only care about other languages if they're in the market for a translator. You're more likely to need Java than... pretty much any language except maybe Spanish.

European experience is very very different than American experience.

I have not learned enough about the history of programming, but I believe it is safe to say that new programming languages keep popping up and old ones go away. Unless you decide to become an IT technician of some kind, the coding you learned is going to be MORE useless than an actual language.

Programming languages have a half-life of something like twenty years- enough time for a high school graduate to start a career and pick up new languages as they move along. Good enough.

The thing is, learning a foreign language (and I refuse to call programming languages to be actual languages in this discussion) will open up a world to you. You won't just open doors to literature, films and other media, but other people and other places! You have no idea how much your perspective can broaden with people speaking to other languages, to experience other cultures. Coming to a non-English country and expecting others to know English makes you a foreigner, a tolerated tourist or clueless boss. Speaking their language can allow you to actually be in another country, to truly begin understanding what's going on around you.

Guess what? For most Americans, the experience of going to other countries is expensive, and unlikely to happen to the average person. Unlike Hungarians, we mostly cannot reach a foreign country which doesn't speak our native tongue just by driving for four or five hours.

So being "a foreigner, a tolerated tourist?" While that is less than we might desire our children to become... under current conditions we're fooling ourselves if we say that being able to be more than that is part of the minimum necessary to get a high school diploma.

And the thing is, and this is partly addressing Kon_El's point, sure, you can survive almost anywhere because English is a lingua franca. An American would have to travel far to get someplace where he HAS to know another language to survive. But what if you want to do more? What if you want to be part of the local community, be part of the local culture, work there? The USA is a country made by immigrants, many of which still speak their languages. There are patches of bilingualism all over the country, with bilingual communities. There are increasing number of Spanish speakers and Spanish-speaking people. There are some states that are officially bilingual.

Americans nonetheless do not travel that much. Not so much that we should automatically assume that learning foreign languages trumps the other skills that could be learned in the same amount of time.

Should it be offered? Yes. Should it be mandatory? Doing so is pretentious and absurd, and not effective at all, unless we do a lot MORE of it... and that simply is not on the table as an option for the schools making this decision, for political reasons they don't control.

[The Xeelee]

I've never understood the obsession with french as THE foreign language taught in schools, it's not as widely spoken as many other languages but in most british state schools it is the only foreign language you get taught for 3 years, at which point you drop it and do something useful like business studies, especially if you live in wales where your education is already crippled due to the requirement to do all your subjects in Welsh including the sciences until you get to sixth form college, at which point you have to relearn all the terminology in english so as to be able to study at university.

As a welsh student I can tell you we don't learn our subjects in welsh (unless you are in the minority that go to welsh schools). You have to take welsh to GCSE but I still can barely speak welsh.

[Wing Commander MAD]

I have not learned enough about the history of programming, but I believe it is safe to say that new programming languages keep popping up and old ones go away. Unless you decide to become an IT technician of some kind, the coding you learned is going to be MORE useless than an actual language.

Actually, the hardest programming language to learn is your first, much like the hardest natural language to learn is usually your second*. Once you've actually learned a programming language and understand it, the knowledge gained is generally transferable to another programming language. Actually, I'd argue that it is somewhat easier to learn a programming language, compared to a natural language simply by their nature*. Formal languages tend to be better and more tightly defined than natural languages could ever hope to be, though the trade-off is usually a decrease in your ability to express yourself in varied ways. That said, for purely conveying information formal languages have natural languages beat. It's all about trade-offs and the proper tool for a particular application.

Simon_Jester raises some very good points.

Note: That really depends on what is spoken in the home as the child grows up, so it could be third, fourth, etc. language.
Note 2: Supposing of you are predisposed to logic and analysis. That at least was my experience.

[fordlltwm]

I've never understood the obsession with french as THE foreign language taught in schools, it's not as widely spoken as many other languages but in most british state schools it is the only foreign language you get taught for 3 years, at which point you drop it and do something useful like business studies, especially if you live in wales where your education is already crippled due to the requirement to do all your subjects in Welsh including the sciences until you get to sixth form college, at which point you have to relearn all the terminology in english so as to be able to study at university.

As a welsh student I can tell you we don't learn our subjects in welsh (unless you are in the minority that go to welsh schools). You have to take welsh to GCSE but I still can barely speak welsh.

I believe from your posting history you're from the South of the country, in the North West the vast majority of schools are primarily welsh medium, with the English medium classes mostly being incomers who've moved fairly recently. I can only think of 1 school in my county that doesn't insist on every pupil who can studying in the medium of welsh, I remember a friend of mine having to get written parental permission to do her sciences in English, and even then the administration and teacher were vocally opposed to it, often remarking upon it while we were in class.

[Broomstick]

While it is desirable that students learn to speak Spanish or French, it is also very much desirable that they learn to think logically, examine their own work carefully for minor flaws (debugging), and understand how machines think and behave.

There is no reason all of those things can't be taught simultaneously. Logical thinking and self-examination has applications across all disciplines.

That is nonsense. About 20% of the world's population speaks English. Do you really think that not adding another 3% by learning French is going to cripple your ability to travel?

It bloody well does if you want to see the bits of a country that aren't specifically set up to cater to tourists.

Which is more important: computer literacy or ability to function as a tourist? Remember that we have in this country a very real concern about whether people can afford to travel overseas, because they don't have adequate jobs... which this addresses.

“Computer literacy” and “knowledge of programming languages” are not the same thing, and haven't been for some decades. People need to know how to use computers just as, by and large, they need to know how to drive in the US. That does not mean everyone in the country needs to be a car mechanic or know how to assemble a car from a pile of parts.

So I don't think we should make the 'utility' argument or the 'lets you communicate with more people' argument. Optimizing for that just leads to mandatory Spanish classes for all, not a broader "foreign language requirement."

And that's a problem... why? There are many nations that utilize two (or more!) official languages, and many of them insist on a third language on top of that. Yet they are not afflicted with an epidemic of students with exploding heads or failure to graduate.

Arguably, being a polyglot has been the more common state for humanity since we all came out of Africa.

This is nothing more than a penny-pinching dodge to avoid paying for teachers for actual living languages other than English. It's yet another example valuing STEM to the exclusion of everything else from language to physical activity. To clarify: while I would be the first to argue that STEM topics are a necessity in today's world they are not the only thing we should be teaching our children.

I find it very unlikely that all students will take programming instead of Spanish or French. Many children would prefer Spanish or French over computer programming.

And.... that's not a problem as far as I can see.

Indeed, I would argue that classing programming as a foreign language is at least a half-step in the direction of vocational education, because it provides a useful career skill for children who are in many cases frustrated by "when will I use this?" They have no more intention of using French than they have of using the Pythagorean Theorem; with programming you can at least give them the easy answer of "you will need this to get hired at a good job."

Except many good jobs do not, in any way, require you to know any sort of programming language.

There is a fair slice of what you learn in school that will not have much to do with your future career. You learn it anyway because either it's a basic concept fundamental to many others, or because most people don't know what their future career will be so a broad education gives them a sufficient base for later specialization.

Otherwise, the “useful for a job” argument leads to dispensing with history, geography, and so forth.

Worse yet, the US does a piss-poor job of teaching STEM despite neglecting nearly everything else in the interest of promoting it.

Literally every state in the union is scrambling on this issue; the main problems come from perverse incentives that punish states for making some important good choices. Remove those incentives and we would BOTH have more time for non-STEM subjects AND be able to teach STEM more effectively to those with aptitude for it.

And that is exactly what we should be doing. However, I am a realist and know that such top to bottom reform isn't going to happen any time soon.

But simply demanding that everyone graduate Spanish isn't going to change that.

Demanding everyone graduate C++ won't do the job, either.

Frankly, at this point I'd be in favor making a study of Spanish mandatory in the US given the increasing Hispanic population and the proximity of Latin America. This will make some folks scream but to me it's a reflection of reality.

This is quite logical- but there are only so many hours in a school day, and good luck forcing the average student to learn three languages, only one of which is spoken in or near their home by people they actually know. So you'd be excluding all other languages from the curriculum for most students, with a handful of exceptions actually willing to volunteer to learn three languages at once.

Once again I point out that being a polyglot is a NORMAL human condition. Why NOT require study in three languages by high school graduation? If Finland can do it why can't we?

Plus, if you have achieved reasonable fluency in one Romance language, you have a good head start on being able to make yourself understood in the others.

You don't even require fluency for that. My knowledge of French allows me to comprehend a fair amount of written Spanish (I'm not so good at understanding the spoken language) and I've never claimed fluency in French.

I WANT everyone to learn a foreign language, but I also want students to have some degree of flexibility and choice. There are literally tens of millions of people in this country who would be at least as well off, if not more so, if they'd had the choice of saying "I want to learn C++" rather than learning Spanish or French.

If we're talking about ideal situations here I'm all for students learning BOTH to at least some degree.

How early is 'early?' We're talking about a high school curriculum here.

Foreign language study should begin before puberty for best results. Actually, before toddlerhood but that's not practical except in already polyglot households.

I suppose we could insist on foreign language study in the first half to 2/3's of schooling and the computer stuff in high school. Learning a second (or more) natural language will help with learning a computer language.

And Grumman, 20% of the world's population speaks English? A good number of those people have such poor skills that you will have enormous difficulty in interacting with them despite their nominal (and often it is just that, in name only) proficiency.

The average high school graduate does not retain full fluency in the language they 'learned,' if they ever had it. I mean, I got Spanish in high school, but my ability to make myself understood verbally in Spanish is basically nothing. My trying to speak Spanish to native Spanish-speakers with only rudimentary English will NOT help.

Yes, it WILL. As I have stated, I have never been fluent in French but I nonetheless found it extremely useful when in Belgium and France, immediately post-high school was hired for a job in part because I had any French knowledge at all, and did in fact use French at that job. It has, from time to time, been useful since then despite my skills deteriorating over the past 30+ years.

To have full fluency in Spanish I would have needed one or two more years of it in high school, followed by a steady stream of encounters with Spanish-speakers to keep up my fluency in the ten years since my graduation.

Er... I don't think I've ever encountered anyone who achieved fluency in a mere two years of classroom instruction. I certainly didn't achieve it in five years of classroom instruction, and when in France those people with a similar amount of classroom English weren't fluent in that language either.

Nonetheless, we could still communicate, which, in the end, is the most important thing here. I can read the headlines in a French newspaper, I can read street signs, ask for and understand directions, read warning signs, make purchases in a shop... Yes, my French is broken French. And a lot of immigrants to the US never get better than broken English, yet it is a functional knowledge of language.

I learned to do other things with that time, and I don't regret it... but it means that I'm basically restricted to English and a near-useless smattering of Spanish and German, when it comes to making myself understood.

On the other hand, the mere fact you were exposed to those languages early in life means that if you ever have a need to revisit them later you will find it significantly easier to recover that knowledge and build further on it than if you had never studied languages at all when young. It makes learning other languages beyond them easier.

if you want to require several years of foreign language, in each of multiple languages, in school... fine. It might even be a good idea. But there are opportunity costs. Students will come out less proficient in mathematics, the sciences, historical literacy, and the ability to make themselves understood in their native tongue.

Bullshit. Is Edi somehow less capable in those other areas because his English rivals that of a native? (at least in the written word – I've never actually heard him speak). Ditto for Thanas. And Stas. And a lot of other people who regularly post here in fluent English despite it being their 2nd, 3rd, nth language.

Of course, part of the problem is the silly American notion of studying languages in isolation from all else. Why not teach history in a second language, or even a third? On what do you base this notion that study of a foreign language impairs use of the native tongue? If anything, studying other languages made my English better, not worse, and imparted a greater understanding of the structure and grammar of my native tongue by comparison with other languages.

I wish I had had more opportunities to use my French and regret I have allowed my skills to rust. I wish I had also studied Spanish. But there is such a resistance to learning another language in this country it's ridiculous. Now I get the “you're too old” argument. Well, too old to learn to speak without an American accent, certainly, but humans retain the capability to improve their language skills into old age, even if it's not as easy as when we were toddlers. That sort of mental exercise helps stave off mental deterioration so, really, we should be encouraging the older folks to have a go at that sort of thing.

Learning other languages makes learning more linguistic skills and retaining all kinds of things easier, because you need to seriously exercise your brain in order to do so. Once you learn one or two additional languages, you begin to see connections between other languages (even unrelated ones) where there are similarities. Learning new languages also allows you to understand cultural issues, because it is often impossible to do so unless you speak at least some of their language.

Yes. I approve of learning new languages. On the other hand, I think at least allowing children to graduate from high school without foreign language credit might... not be unreasonable, shall we say.

Do you want the US to play on the global stage, engage in commerce in the global marketplace, and participate fully in world affairs? Then no, failure to study other languages is NOT reasonable. I don't think we should expect everyone to graduate high school as a linguist, no more than we expect them to graduate as mathematicians, full fledged scientists, or eminent historians but they should have SOME knowledge of other languages just as we expect everyone to have a basic knowledge of math, history, science, and so forth.

Furthermore, if there is a job on offer where you might run into foreigners and have to deal with them, all other things being equal, who is going to get hired, the person who speaks only one language, or the one who speaks two? Remember that the foreigner might not speak your language, but might speak the one you have as a second language.

This argument applies better if your second language is C++ than if it's Spanish or French, at least in America.

I have, on three occasions, held jobs where even my rudimentary knowledge of French was unquestionably an asset. To wit, the post-high school job I already mentioned where I was speaking with Quebecois on a regular basis, another in college where someone needed an assistant able to pull French as well as English references off a library bookshelf, and a job with medical researchers where my ability to at least identify several different languages even if not read them fluently (or at all, for the Korean and Japanese), allowed me to properly route them to the correct translators.

When my spouse was working as musician specializing in ethnic music my even more rudimentary knowledge of Gaelic was an asset both because I could at least pronounce the names of things roughly correctly, and because speakers of some English dialects from formerly Gaelic areas have some language quirks derived from that language that were understandable to me, having at least some knowledge of Gaelic, but pretty opaque to a lot of other Americans.

Now that I work retail I would LOVE a working knowledge of Spanish (and have even picked up a very few words and phrases) because about 10-15% of our customers have that as a first language.

Mind you, I live in the freakin' “heartland” of the US way far away from any foreign country and have never made any attempt to seek out jobs requiring foreign language knowledge. It's like math – you don't need advanced math for a lot of jobs but having it can nonetheless be an asset that sets you apart/ahead of the crowd.

This sort of thing will only become more and more common with time and with further globalization.

While we're at it, I'd support the same decision in, say, Russia or China or any other large industrialized nation.

Funny, though – don't Russia and China have much greater language requirements in primary schooling than the US? Study of English in either of those two countries is more common than study of ANY foreign language is in the US. True, a LOT of Russians and Chinese have very poor English skills but it seems a peculiarly American notion that only fluency in a foreign language is worth anything at all. You don't have to be fluent to get benefits from language study.

If your nation is small and you have a LOT of routine dealings with foreigners (as in Finland), foreign language needs to be a larger fraction of your nation's curricula than if your population is large and much of your population NEVER deals with foreigners (as in the US or China).

Where do you live you NEVER deal with foreigners in the US? Seriously, where is that place? I have lived in 5 different states and visited about 15 others and in every damn one of them I have encountered foreigners.

There are a host of things American schools can and should teach. We need national political will to support teaching those things, teaching them properly, and dealing appropriately with students who are grossly unqualified to learn them properly.

Until the will to do all those things comes into place, school districts are trapped and scrambling to SOMEHOW get the kids out the doors with diplomas that actually mean something and give them a fighting chance of adult success.

Do I approve of everything being done in the name of that? No, no I do not.

Does that mean that I freak out and go into denial that there's an issue just because American public schools (surprise!) do not have and have never had the same kind of foreign language programs as European public schools?

Sounds and smells like American Exceptionalism to me. Do you think everyone in Europe achieves perfect English by the time they leave school? They don't – I've experienced that myself when I was over there. You get a distorted view because those from aboard who interact most with Americans are those with the best language skills, the ones with lacking skills stay home and don't cruise SDN.net

For too long American schools have cut back and cut back and dumbed down and limited options in the name of CRISIS! or whatever. It's not working. A high school diploma means FAR less today than it did when I got mine, and this pernicious rot has extended into college to contaminate Bachelor degrees as well. We act like our students are less capable than any other children in the world, and act surprised when it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So what, you want to strike foreign languages from the curriculum entirely because improving the syllabus is too much hard work?

No, he wants to allow students to graduate from high school without taking a foreign language class.

The argument is that "can speak a foreign language" is not the same order of qualification as "can read and write well enough to be in the 10th percentile or higher of society" or "can cope with similar triangles and quadratic equations if pressured." We might say that a person has attained at least a basic, functional education given the needs of actual American students even if they have not taken a foreign language class.

We do our students a disservice by not exposing them to other languages.

I don't think anyone is arguing that actually mastering foreign languages is desirable and good for a child's development. But experience in Europe, with European schools, may not carry over perfectly to experience in the US, which is different geographically and has a wide range of interlocking problems that undermine its schools' performance.

More American Exceptionalism, and of the most pernicious sort. Are you claiming American students are incapable of studying a foreign language? What, there's something in the water that makes the uniquely disabled when compared to the entire rest of humanity?

[The Xeelee]

I've never understood the obsession with french as THE foreign language taught in schools, it's not as widely spoken as many other languages but in most british state schools it is the only foreign language you get taught for 3 years, at which point you drop it and do something useful like business studies, especially if you live in wales where your education is already crippled due to the requirement to do all your subjects in Welsh including the sciences until you get to sixth form college, at which point you have to relearn all the terminology in english so as to be able to study at university.

As a welsh student I can tell you we don't learn our subjects in welsh (unless you are in the minority that go to welsh schools). You have to take welsh to GCSE but I still can barely speak welsh.

I believe from your posting history you're from the South of the country, in the North West the vast majority of schools are primarily welsh medium, with the English medium classes mostly being incomers who've moved fairly recently. I can only think of 1 school in my county that doesn't insist on every pupil who can studying in the medium of welsh, I remember a friend of mine having to get
written parental permission to do her sciences in English, and even then the administration and teacher were vocally opposed to it, often remarking upon it while we were in class.

True, I am from the cool part of the country. There is only one welsh language school in my county and it takes students from the next county over. We only speak welsh when the Rugby is on and even that is only the national anthem and Cymru Am Byth. I actually can hold a conversation in welsh but It is basic.

[Simon_Jester]

While it is desirable that students learn to speak Spanish or French, it is also very much desirable that they learn to think logically, examine their own work carefully for minor flaws (debugging), and understand how machines think and behave.

There is no reason all of those things can't be taught simultaneously. Logical thinking and self-examination has applications across all disciplines.

They can be taught simultaneously. If they were, and this were a routine thing, we wouldn't even be having this conversation because students would have no problem taking computer programming as an elective AND meeting their foreign language requirement.

In effect, what this does is allow any child who wants to take computer programming one more slot for electives, which they may or may not spend on a foreign language. I don't believe for a moment that any school in this district is planning to remove their foreign language courses.

Which is more important: computer literacy or ability to function as a tourist? Remember that we have in this country a very real concern about whether people can afford to travel overseas, because they don't have adequate jobs... which this addresses.

“Computer literacy” and “knowledge of programming languages” are not the same thing, and haven't been for some decades. People need to know how to use computers just as, by and large, they need to know how to drive in the US. That does not mean everyone in the country needs to be a car mechanic or know how to assemble a car from a pile of parts.

Since computer literacy isn't being reliably taught either, this does not reinforce your argument.

If we want to make the argument that it's better from a utilitarian point of view that all children know a foreign language... we have to actually compare "spend two years on high school Spanish" to all the other things we might do with those two years in a classroom.

So I don't think we should make the 'utility' argument or the 'lets you communicate with more people' argument. Optimizing for that just leads to mandatory Spanish classes for all, not a broader "foreign language requirement."

And that's a problem... why? There are many nations that utilize two (or more!) official languages, and many of them insist on a third language on top of that. Yet they are not afflicted with an epidemic of students with exploding heads or failure to graduate.

Let me be more clear:

I don't think it likely that "convert all foreign language departments in schools into Spanish departments, with other languages as an afterthought" is actually what we want to do. At least, it really really should not be near the top of anyone's list on things it makes sense to change in education.

I find it very unlikely that all students will take programming instead of Spanish or French. Many children would prefer Spanish or French over computer programming.

And.... that's not a problem as far as I can see.

You may have missed this, but my point is simply that IF you are the sort of person who would honestly rather take a foreign language, then you can. If you'd rather learn to program computers, you can do that instead.

If we're going to argue that kids should have the option to take woodworking classes instead of precalculus, I think we should be willing to argue that kids should have the option to take computer programming instead of Spanish, which as at least as practical in terms of actual educational outcomes.

Indeed, I would argue that classing programming as a foreign language is at least a half-step in the direction of vocational education, because it provides a useful career skill for children who are in many cases frustrated by "when will I use this?" They have no more intention of using French than they have of using the Pythagorean Theorem; with programming you can at least give them the easy answer of "you will need this to get hired at a good job."

Except many good jobs do not, in any way, require you to know any sort of programming language.

There is a fair slice of what you learn in school that will not have much to do with your future career. You learn it anyway because either it's a basic concept fundamental to many others, or because most people don't know what their future career will be so a broad education gives them a sufficient base for later specialization.

Otherwise, the “useful for a job” argument leads to dispensing with history, geography, and so forth.

Yes- my point being that this (like many other things) undermines the utilitarian argument, saying that we should make the kids take rudimentary Spanish/French/whatever for their own good.

Can we actually say that the mental advantages of rudimentary education in a foreign language are objectively superior to the advantages of a rudimentary education in computer programming? I don't know.

Literally every state in the union is scrambling on this issue; the main problems come from perverse incentives that punish states for making some important good choices. Remove those incentives and we would BOTH have more time for non-STEM subjects AND be able to teach STEM more effectively to those with aptitude for it.

And that is exactly what we should be doing. However, I am a realist and know that such top to bottom reform isn't going to happen any time soon.

And I submit that absent such change, schools have to work within their real constraints... which means making choices you might not prefer. You might like all children to have four years of Spanish and enough time for electives to teach them computer programming too. As it happened I had that much flexibility... but most kids didn't, because most kids did not perform as well and didn't get as good an education.

Once again I point out that being a polyglot is a NORMAL human condition. Why NOT require study in three languages by high school graduation? If Finland can do it why can't we?

If you can get Spanish into the elementary schools go ahead. Do that first, and only then should you start letting it crowd out other languages in high school.

My point is that this is NOT the first thing we should change, if we're asking "why can't our schools be as good as [random European country?]" If nothing else, American schools need a curriculum that suits the actual needs of American students and... bluntly, American students do not need a foreign language (or three of them) quite as badly as Finns do.

I don't think Chinese or Russians really need the foreign languages that much either. Latin Americans, likewise- because Spanish is a major world language and they can travel far and wide while remaining in the Spanish-speaking sphere.

I WANT everyone to learn a foreign language, but I also want students to have some degree of flexibility and choice. There are literally tens of millions of people in this country who would be at least as well off, if not more so, if they'd had the choice of saying "I want to learn C++" rather than learning Spanish or French.

If we're talking about ideal situations here I'm all for students learning BOTH to at least some degree.

Do you actually think "students should have flexibility in which of several options they pursue to customize the education they get from their high school diploma" is the same order of idealized statement as "students should learn a foreign language and computer programming simultaneously?"

How early is 'early?' We're talking about a high school curriculum here.

Foreign language study should begin before puberty for best results. Actually, before toddlerhood but that's not practical except in already polyglot households.

Well gee, in that case it's kind of pointless to harass the high schools about something that should have happened in the elementary schools, isn't it?

Yes, it WILL. As I have stated, I have never been fluent in French but I nonetheless found it extremely useful when in Belgium and France, immediately post-high school was hired for a job in part because I had any French knowledge at all, and did in fact use French at that job. It has, from time to time, been useful since then despite my skills deteriorating over the past 30+ years.

To be more clear, the marginal utility is pretty low. Have I gotten a LITTLE mileage out of knowing Spanish? Yes. A little. Enough to justify the 500 or so classroom hours I sank into learning it, plus the opportunity costs of all the other things I didn't learn? Not really. A lot of other Americans could say much the same.

I don't think it's out of line for us to at least consider that maybe a minimally educated person in our society might... not speak a foreign language, and might instead have some other useful qualification, while still having all the usual qualifications in mathematics, social studies, and so forth.

if you want to require several years of foreign language, in each of multiple languages, in school... fine. It might even be a good idea. But there are opportunity costs. Students will come out less proficient in mathematics, the sciences, historical literacy, and the ability to make themselves understood in their native tongue.

Bullshit. Is Edi somehow less capable in those other areas because his English rivals that of a native? (at least in the written word – I've never actually heard him speak). Ditto for Thanas. And Stas. And a lot of other people who regularly post here in fluent English despite it being their 2nd, 3rd, nth language.

All else being equal- quite possibly. It's hard to measure.

Speaking for the US, a lot of our schools are busting their asses just trying to get basic numeracy and the ability to write on a high school level in. The parents aren't supporting the kids with things we'd like to take for granted (i.e. kid comes to 1st grade knowing how to read, and how NOT to make a scene that prevents the teacher from teaching anything for ten minutes).

Does that mean there aren't high-functioning polyglots who excel in multiple intellectually demanding disciplines in America? There are quite a few such people. No doubt Edi is one of their Finnish counterparts, and Thanas one of their German counterparts.

And yet as a brute reality, if we teach one classroom hour per day more of Spanish for three years, it means we are teaching one classroom hour per day less of something else... which has to have an effect somewhere.

There may be a limiting effect that keeps it from getting too bad. It's still there.

I wish I had had more opportunities to use my French and regret I have allowed my skills to rust. I wish I had also studied Spanish. But there is such a resistance to learning another language in this country it's ridiculous. Now I get the “you're too old” argument. Well, too old to learn to speak without an American accent, certainly, but humans retain the capability to improve their language skills into old age, even if it's not as easy as when we were toddlers. That sort of mental exercise helps stave off mental deterioration so, really, we should be encouraging the older folks to have a go at that sort of thing.

I am SO in favor of adult education- it's just not within the scope of what this Louisiana school district is doing.

I have, on three occasions, held jobs where even my rudimentary knowledge of French was unquestionably an asset. To wit, the post-high school job I already mentioned where I was speaking with Quebecois on a regular basis, another in college where someone needed an assistant able to pull French as well as English references off a library bookshelf, and a job with medical researchers where my ability to at least identify several different languages even if not read them fluently (or at all, for the Korean and Japanese), allowed me to properly route them to the correct translators.

Yes, this is advantageous, and I can understand that. My objection is that it is not so obviously the ONLY advantageous thing that I find it hard to fault the Louisiana school district.

While we're at it, I'd support the same decision in, say, Russia or China or any other large industrialized nation.

Funny, though – don't Russia and China have much greater language requirements in primary schooling than the US? Study of English in either of those two countries is more common than study of ANY foreign language is in the US. True, a LOT of Russians and Chinese have very poor English skills but it seems a peculiarly American notion that only fluency in a foreign language is worth anything at all. You don't have to be fluent to get benefits from language study.

They do do more, it's their choice, I support it. They probably do a lot of other things with their schools I approve of to even make that a practical choice for them to take. I would LOVE to be doing all the things right that they're doing right.

If your nation is small and you have a LOT of routine dealings with foreigners (as in Finland), foreign language needs to be a larger fraction of your nation's curricula than if your population is large and much of your population NEVER deals with foreigners (as in the US or China).

Where do you live you NEVER deal with foreigners in the US? Seriously, where is that place? I have lived in 5 different states and visited about 15 others and in every damn one of them I have encountered foreigners.

Let me be more clear- I deal with foreigners semi-regularly, but casually. I could have a pretty happy life while avoiding dealings with them, it would not stop me from functioning in society. So I suppose I should have used a less absolute term than 'never.'

There are a host of things American schools can and should teach. We need national political will to support teaching those things, teaching them properly, and dealing appropriately with students who are grossly unqualified to learn them properly.

Until the will to do all those things comes into place, school districts are trapped and scrambling to SOMEHOW get the kids out the doors with diplomas that actually mean something and give them a fighting chance of adult success.

Do I approve of everything being done in the name of that? No, no I do not.

Does that mean that I freak out and go into denial that there's an issue just because American public schools (surprise!) do not have and have never had the same kind of foreign language programs as European public schools?

Sounds and smells like American Exceptionalism to me. Do you think everyone in Europe achieves perfect English by the time they leave school? They don't – I've experienced that myself when I was over there. You get a distorted view because those from aboard who interact most with Americans are those with the best language skills, the ones with lacking skills stay home and don't cruise SDN.net

Does this actually address the issue I raise? If American schools are struggling as hard as they seem to be, while being unable to change any of the fundamental problems i describe... I can think of reactions a lot less productive than 'make computer programming an optional alternative to foreign language, so that we can at least graduate kids who know how to program, whereas previously they had too few elective options to pursue it.'

For too long American schools have cut back and cut back and dumbed down and limited options in the name of CRISIS! or whatever. It's not working. A high school diploma means FAR less today than it did when I got mine, and this pernicious rot has extended into college to contaminate Bachelor degrees as well. We act like our students are less capable than any other children in the world, and act surprised when it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I agree. Here, options are being actively expanded; the Louisiana district is giving kids the option of pursuing something different (and hopefully excelling) instead of just being mediocre at Spanish for a few years and then forgetting everything.

And you oppose this because, as you rightly point out, it is good for kids to learn a foreign language. It's good for them to learn ANYTHING, except maybe the most absurd of optionals (the famed underwater basket-weaving). That doesn't mean the school can start teaching EVERYTHING, unless we can rustle up the political will to keep them in school ten hours a day and pay two shifts of teachers to watch them.

So what, you want to strike foreign languages from the curriculum entirely because improving the syllabus is too much hard work?

No, he wants to allow students to graduate from high school without taking a foreign language class.

The argument is that "can speak a foreign language" is not the same order of qualification as "can read and write well enough to be in the 10th percentile or higher of society" or "can cope with similar triangles and quadratic equations if pressured." We might say that a person has attained at least a basic, functional education given the needs of actual American students even if they have not taken a foreign language class.

We do our students a disservice by not exposing them to other languages.

We do our students a disservice by not exposing them to a lot of things. Me, if it were up to me, I'd say "okay, make expulsions easier for behavioral problems, concentrate on educating 75-80% of the population, and NOT on warehousing the remaining 20-25%." That's how we used to do it.

I see an article like this...

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/arc ... us/276604/

Which basically says "OK, our schools aren't doing well but by God our graduation rate has never been higher!" And they seem blind to the idea that there might be a correlation there.

I don't think anyone is arguing that actually mastering foreign languages is desirable and good for a child's development. But experience in Europe, with European schools, may not carry over perfectly to experience in the US, which is different geographically and has a wide range of interlocking problems that undermine its schools' performance.

More American Exceptionalism, and of the most pernicious sort. Are you claiming American students are incapable of studying a foreign language? What, there's something in the water that makes the uniquely disabled when compared to the entire rest of humanity?

I'm claiming that in a triage situation, which is what that Louisiana school district may feel like they're in... there are other things that I would at least seriously consider offering as an alternative, something of potentially equal value, to foreign language instruction.

How is this even a different concept from the "no need to take precalculus, take sheet metal working instead!" stuff that I'm morally certain you could get behind?

[Kon_El]

Except many good jobs do not, in any way, require you to know any sort of programming language.

The computer programing jobs that are the stated goal of this proposed law do however find it useful. The law isn't removing the other languages from the curriculum it simply wants to add computer programing to the list of choices.

Once again I point out that being a polyglot is a NORMAL human condition. Why NOT require study in three languages by high school graduation? If Finland can do it why can't we?

Having small national/linguistic borders have also been historically normal. Perhaps there is a connection? Speaking multiple languages is less important when you live in the middle of a country that is nearly 29 times the size of Finland. The ability to speak a second language is less important when you can easily go years without even meeting someone who doesn't speak English.

[Kon_El]

disregard