The US should remove foreign language education requirements | Hacker News Reader

The US should remove foreign language education requirements

marginalrevolution.com

12 pointsrobertwiblin31 comments

Completely backwards. Make it effective, don’t kill it. The obvious way to do that is to start early. The typically US approach is to ignore foreign languages until high school, when the child is well past their best years for acquiring a new language. Why did anyone ever think that was a good idea?

I went to a Jewish day school as a child. We had Hebrew classes from preschool through 8th grade (after which point I switched to a secular high school).

At the end of 8th grade, I could still divide my class into two groups: people who cannot speak Hebrew, and people who speak Hebrew at home.

In college, I took 2 semesters of Japanese. Guess which language I am stronger at today. (Still no where near fluent).

We would not devote nearly enough time in school to teach children a second language.

It’s obviously possible, since lots of countries do it with English. Let’s do it right.

This reasoning sounds silly. There are plenty of people who don't remember much of anything from geography, history, spelling, geometry, algebra, etc, either, so should we simply get rid of 90% of school?

Or is there a purpose served by this stuff even if it doesn't lead to long-term recall?

For instance, exposure to a broad range of things so you can find your interests and speak more intelligently about at least some of them, in the future (even if that just means remembering what to look up that you realize you forgot). Or just learning how to study various different types of things in the first place, so that when you do need to get serious about something, you aren't hopeless.

The person being quoted (Bryan Caplan) does actually make similar claims to what you're saying. His claim is that most people use very little of what they learn in school and that the main thing that school does is show you're smart because you were able to graduate. So instead of making kids waste time learning stuff they're just going to forget (or never really learn as in the case of foreign languages), we should strip down the school curriculum and only teach them things relevant to their future life.

I think that learning to study stuff - especially when it's not obviously relevant or interesting at first - is incredibly relevant to later in life.

I also don't think we'd be great at predicting the 10% that's "most relevant" for any given person. It's like the "reinventing Excel" problem - everyone only uses 10%, but everyone uses a different 10%.

I think we should try to shorten the school curriculum - give some more purpose to people's ages 15-20 years, instead of filling it up with busywork while they're at their most restless and energetic - but not reduce it's breadth at all. Cramming extracurriculurs into every hour of the day to fill up time to tick boxes for a college application is a much bigger problem than foreign language classes, in my mind.

Starting really early is the key. I am Albanian and grew up watching Italian TV, and learned Italian as a kid. Only took two semesters of Italian classes, yet the language ability (especially reading and comprehension) is still there 30 years later. It takes just a bit longer to kick my speaking abilities into gear. (Usually a couple of days when visiting).

I did take two years of German lessons (High school and college), and unfortunately I forgot it by now.

The key is: 1) Start really early (6 or 7 years old) and 2) Immersion is key. Learn by being immersed int the language (either TV, living in the country, etc).

When I visited Sweden and Denmark, I couldn’t find anybody that didn’t know English well. Everyone was really good at it, and I suspect is part of the reason that Sacandinavian countries have better living standards than Germany/France/Spain, where it was very often hard to communicate in English.

English is the de-facto business language, and while as an American you can get by without knowing a foreign language, knowing one well is huge asset to your life.

One pro-tip: the best language to learn is the language from a country that you like the culture. You can really know a language by only being immersed in the culture as well.

By being an asset I mean it allows you to be able to move to a country with a lot less friction. Eg. knowing German well, it opens your world and ability to do business life locally and live in Germany, Austria and Switzerland without the huge penalty if you didn't know the language.

The problem with this view is that foreign language education isn't about the language per se (although that's a bonus if you manage to get good), it's about providing a vehicle for understanding history and culture in context.

Latin is a favorite punching bag in this discussion, and I don't want to argue about the practical benefit of _speaking_ Latin right now. But learning to _read_ Latin is learning how to deal with long, difficult, and poorly defined problems---skills that translate (no pun intended) to almost any field.

The most interesting axiom here is that if something can't be taught well, it shouldn't be taught at all.

I took French (as was required in Canada), which was taught badly. For 2 years we had a teacher who didn't actually speak French, but taught vocabulary out of the textbook. I also took a year of Latin, which was taught well by an inspiring teacher. I'm sure I got more value out of Latin, even though speaking French is occasionally useful.

Whoever has learned French can read French literature. It's puzzling that the idea of school exposing the children to culture and broadening their mind never occurs to Alex Tabarrok. Why does everything have to serve the job market?

He's not saying that's not a good thing. He's saying it's a waste of time to do it in school because school doesn't teach people to learn languages.

Many foreigners manage to learn English and other languages quite nicely in their schools, thankyou very much. What Tabarrok says is that foreign languages are a waste of time, not that they are taught badly.

No, he literally says:

> Don’t make the mistake of arguing that knowing a second language has many benefits. The point is that foreign language instruction in schools doesn’t teach a second language.

I get your point that other countries manage to teach English. But English has a large amount of utility to non-English speakers. The reverse isn't true for most languages English speakers could learn.

I'm decidedly not anti-foreign languages. I can understand some Norwegian and French and am learning Arabic, but it is much less useful for me to know these languages than for a speaker of them to know English.

So maybe he'd be happy if we just upped the teaching methods to provide more effective learning?

The US is doing pretty terribly in scholarship right now so I can understand the frustration coming from how little the money we do spend tends to effect things, but the conclusion that we need to save that money as well seems pretty wrong-headed.

What non-multilingual country (e.g. Switzerland) manages to teach foreign languages (other than English) to a reasonable degree of competence to a substantial portion of its population? I can't name one.

> It's puzzling that the idea of school exposing the children to culture

This is a very bad argument for selecting school curricula, since you could use it for an overwhelmingly massive amount of subjects.

The problem is that four years of high school French (or whatever) doesn't teach the language to any appreciable degree. ("The point is that foreign language instruction in schools doesn’t teach a second language.")

Now, I suppose you could double down on immersive language training etc. But, unlike the case of English in the Nordics for example, there's no single language that lots of US children would be greatly advantaged by learning.

In my case, I took 4 years of HS French (and 2 of Latin), My French is better than nothing compared to someone who has never had any, but it sure isn't anything approaching fluent.

In other words, 4 years of language is a pretty big block of HS time for a subject that seems to be pretty ineffective.

I was required to take 5 years of Spanish it was a huge drag and I learned next to nothing. I lived in South Korea for one year and my Korean is far far better. Foreign language learning requires immersion and motivation - both of which are absent in a normal high school class.

"restriction" is always bad when it comes to education. If it is coming from far away places like DC or Sacramento it is even worse.

These restrictions are particularly bad for the minority and vulnerable groups. That black kid being raised by a single mother doing 3 jobs will do much better if he does not have to learn that extra language which he wont use any ways. His time is better spent on English and Math.

On other hand asians kids can easily learn 2-3 languages. My kid knows English, Spanish, Bangla, Hindi very fluently for her age while she is taking extra classes in Japanese (because her friends are taking it). I have time and money to support her academic ambitions but forcing them on everyone seems highly unjust.

These decisions must be left to local school and parents.

That black kid being raised by a single mother doing 3 jobs will do much better if he does not have to learn that extra language which he wont use any ways

The counterargument is that the child from underprivileged background is better served by Spanish instruction because he won't have the family support (and Latina nanny) that a child from a wealthy family has.

It's an ongoing problem at my institution. The students, many of whom are first-generation students, are accepted into their science program and a huge number has serious deficiencies in basic algebra! Differential calculus is completely out of the question. If you don't offer the opportunity at school you are cementing in the two-class society.

Most people are responding saying: but knowing a foreign language has lots of benefits. That's true and not the argument being made. The argument being made is almost no one learns a foreign language in school so that time is wasted

In all fairness, it appears that people do reasonably learn foreign languages (English in particular) when they start earlier and it's a priority. Of course, in the case of the US, that would require doubling down teaching something that won't have value for a lot of people.

We've done this partly in the UK. It's not good, people are lazy and expect everyone to speak Egnlish, which may be the case in business, but not always, and there's always more opprtunities when you can find and speak to clients in their native language.

As others have said, languages are much wider than grammer and vocab books, you learn so much. I've noticed I tend to have diffirent thought patterns and attitudes to things depending on the language I'm speaking or thinking in, it's bizarre and amazing at the same time. And I now know far more about english grammar than I ever learned in english lang classes.

I took 1 year of Russian in school and I still know how to read Cyrillic a little, but don't know all the words. And for some reason, I can also make out Greek because of it.

Early immersion is probably best way to teach foreign languages.

The Cyrillic script (used in many Slavic languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Serbian) was developed by a medieval Bulgarian scholar (Clement of Ohrid) as a simplification of the older Glagolitic script and was/is based in part on the Greek alphabet.

People underestimate the value of learning the structure of the process of learning a foreign language as early as possible..

I noticed in university that most high school subjects have about 2 years of daily curriculum that a university can magically squeeze into one semester of 3 hours a week for the students that missed it or failed to learn it.. So maybe university should start at eighth grade? Or maybe what needs to be fixed is more fundamental than foreign language; it's not much worse than the high school teaching of any subject with enough variation that a child doesn't see a social expectation applying to most adults.

Personally, I think mandatory school levels should offer Esperanto, which students can use to survive any European language in university and as a structure to learn later in life when they have a better idea what they want to learn.

Without language options in school I would not be a Spanish speaker today. I love speaking spanish. I continued to speak it in college.

Outside of general value, it's also a great tool for life and work. It allows me to appreciate other cultures, travel, and (oh by the way) communicate with a great deal of Americans in a more effective way. I dare say if I was a line manager at most restaurants or in the agricultural field these days it would be a damned-near critical skill. I get not making it mandatory, but to not teach it at all seems like dereliction.

Back when I went to school, they still had Latin as well as Greek as options in addition to French and Spanish. Wish I had chosen Latin over Spanish. Back then Chinese wasn’t available, unfortch.

That said I agree with author. Foreign langs don’t help non native speakers of foreign Lang land jobs. It’s virtually useless with job prospects.

Something like 9 years of Latin for me, between elementary school and college... The only thing I might have traded it for was Chinese, and even then I'd have liked to take both (ended up doing Japanese instead because there was a class for it) before dropping Latin. I'm saddened to hear "Still had Latin" in the context that schools are dropping it. I'm hard pressed to think of another concentration that benefited me so much later in life. (Across public speaking/oratory skills, Vocabulary/flexibility of speech, and ability to parse/extrapolate novel content in both my own and similar languages)

The article entirely misses the point of why it was beneficial to me. It gave me a framework and practice using said framework for parsing and constructing natural language content, in a way that no english/grammer class ever came close (and we were crammed into those classes for FAR longer than I took latin). Bluntly, I reject their entire hypothesis. The US needs to improve our education system broadly, not axe yet another area in which we already fall behind our international peers. (My wife speaks 2 languages fluently, 2 more near-fluently, I am perpetually embarrassed by my own lack of worldliness next to her.)

We’re doing it wrong, alternative languages should be offered throughout school. For me, it was French only in Elementary then only Spanish in middle school. HS has both. What kind of system is that?

> Don’t make the mistake of arguing that knowing a second language has many benefits. The point is that foreign language instruction in schools doesn’t teach a second language.

Here he seems to be making the argument that it just doesn't work rather than that it's not worth it. At the same time, Bryan Caplan whom he quotes and seemingly endorses, is arguing that it's not really worth it.

Not quite sure what to make of this other than that both points strike me as equally ridiculous.

Foreign languages absolutely /are/ worth it, even if one is lucky enough to be born in an English-speaking country, and saying that second language education should be dropped because it doesn't work is absurd.

Language education certainly needs to be improved all over the world. There is enough research and anecdotal evidence that clearly shows that the standard language education with a focus on learning grammar and doing 'fill in the missing word' exercises from day one is largely a waste of time as opposed to a focus on listening comprehension and learning whole phrases and sentences in context and with relevant material one has a genuine interest in.

For example I find there's a strong correlation between English movies being subtitled (Netherlands, Nordic countries), as opposed to dubbed (Spain, France), and general English levels in the population.

As for the 'hardly any jobs use foreign languages' argument - that really is quite disturbing, but in a way also very honest at the same time. The goal of school isn't to help children develop into self-determined fully-formed adults but rather to produce economically useful human resources.

Learning different languages enables one to view and conceptualise the world differently. There's a strong indication that being multi-lingual reduces the risk of Alzheimer's and dementia. A second language opens up a whole new world, culture, literature in a way that consuming translated material simply cannot provide.

Last but not least, it seems to me that there's a frighteningly large number of Americans whose worldview is more or less that North America is the cradle of civilisation, Europe is this quaint little village where you can go on holiday and the rest of the world is basically a shithole, to paraphrase our beloved leader of the free world.

In my opinion being exposed to a different culture/world from an early age through an improved language curriculum focusing on immersion in real world material can absolutely have a positive effect on this and in that context also help improve the current political discourse, which, to butcher a quote from John Oliver, mostly boils down to "two people who don't know what they're talking about, being condescending to each other until one of them eventually manages to land a sick burn". Who knows, if more people had a better idea of what the world actually looks like outside of their own borders, it might even become a little harder for the US to keep spreading all that democracy around it.

Sorry about the rant, this sort of thing really gets me going.

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