Language

Foreign languages are poorly taught in the US compared with Europe. Where I went to school, foreign languages (specifically, French, Spanish, and German) were offered as electives in middle school and only two years were required in high school for college admission purposes. As I remember, a study cited in an old issue of US News and World Report suggested that a person’s capacity for learning other languages fluently peters off at around the age of 6. Certainly, I hope you would agree, a person’s capacity for learning new languages is significantly diminished by the time said person is 11 or 12 years old-- especially if the person isn’t exposed to other languages very much. Anyway, I have no idea what the statistics are but I don’t think very many people in the US are multilingual.

As citizens of the US, are we not also citizens of the world? If we have the audacity to attack sovereign nations unilaterally, should we not also have the decency to at least speak their languages?

I don’t want to limit this discussion just to the way language is taught in the US. With the internet bringing people together in unprecedented ways as a global community, It seems to me that fluency in other languages - or lack of it - is an important issue.