Should US schools enforce Spanish as a Second Language?
I used to work in Retail in Southern California, where I had to help customers by pointing to pictures. I feel that, even though I am against Spanish in the USA, we need to somewhat accommodate the older people who did not attend school here.
I have friends who natively speak Spanish, but they force their children to speak English, and Spanish as a second language. Should schools adopt a similar policy?
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M$2 Answers
I think it's important to learn other languages because it adds flexibility to the brain. There are studies that show that learning another language can also help students with overall learning. However, I believe this is also true of learning music and art. Studies support all of this. Making Spanish a mandatory language would be very difficult. First there is the funding issue. As it is, many schools are cutting out non-essentials and foreign languages are getting hit, just like music and art. Next, there would be the dearth of qualified teachers, especially to take students through more advanced parts of the language. Let's face it, foreign language learning in the U.S. is not that organized. Small children take language classes. Then when they get to high school, they start from the beginning again. Going to college, students start from the beginning again. There really is very little opportunity for advanced study the way the system is now set up and it would cost too much to overhaul.
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1 - US people should all know another language than English, as in today's world everybody should know at least 2 languages.
While US and British people do usually think that English should be the universal language and so that any other language is useless, today's world simply says this is not true
Read http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm and read more carefully yet
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
English is now only 27% of web users and has a low growth rate, while Chinese is close to this figure and will soon outpace it. Spanish is a very distant 3rd, but its importance in the US would suggest strongly to consider it.
2 - Learning a second language is an essential step towards being open to other languages / cultures / people: it will also help always remembering that there are other visions in the world, and that there are lots of differences, not just a single language / culture / behaviour
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