Foreign languages in public school

Oh yeah...because there's absolutely no use for German ever in the world. French I can see cutting out, since it's only used in Canada, small countries, and a country that will likely be taken over by Germany anyway.

And I'm glad all the ancient writers and thinkers are coming back to re-write the classics from Latin into English ~ not to mention the fact that science and medicine have both recently decided to change all of its standard names into Mandarin and Arabic. To top it off, none of the recent Western languages are attached to Latin any more since the text messaging era has changed so many of our root spellings. (Or should I say, "da txt msg era done chngd so mny o' r rut spllings?")

Sarcastic? Yeah.... That's what I do as a stand up comedian to get a point across.

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Not what you asked, but my son's (private) school teaches Mandarin. The kids are taught it from kindergarten onwards.

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I never said there is no use ever in speaking German, French or Latin. But let's see..

4.6 times as many people in the world speak Mandarin as speak German, and that's a number that will continue to grow in the next several decades. We have depressingly few Arabic speakers in the U.S. and there are more Arabic speakers in the world than German speakers, and again, that is only going to grow rapidly. China is our second largest trading partner, by a factor of more than three over Germany and almost five over France.

We have an Asian studies program at my university. Even in this economic climate, there is a demand for graduates who speak Mandarin. I'm not seeing this so much for say, Latin.

I assume that you are talking about secondary education here.

Our elementary schools offer no language instruction, unless the parents pay for it (our program pays for a Spanish instructor, but it's only 1 day a week, and let's be real here--that is not instruction, it's exposure).

Most people I know, even people that took 4 years of secondary langauge instruction are not literate or conversationally competant in any of the languages they took. That generally only comes with real conversation, which bluntly doesn't really happen in 50 minutes 5 days a week. Especially since the beginning of the year is often review, and the languages are being taught by people who are not native speakers and they keep the conversation slooooooow.

To master Arabic or Mandarin takes quite a lot of dedication, especially since you seem to be talking about competancy (there's a demand for Arabic speakers, yes--but they have to be literate and able to keep up with the speed of real conversation). I agree that having exposure might pique the interest of those who are going to be interested, but if it turns into yet another "check these 3 boxes off for the college app" or "my dad told me I HAVE to take <insert language here>" then not only is that student not going to gain competancy they may drag down others as well.

Also, the more "rarely spoken/instructed" a language is, the harder it is to hire a teacher for it, especially something like arabic where people can be paid a hell of a lot more to go do it for another government institution or private entity.

I know a few people who are fluent (for non-native speakers or people who didn't grow up speaking it) in Arabic and Mandarin. All of them learned it in college because they had a high drive to do so, except for one who learned it in high school in a private crash course before he went on an exchange student program.

My high school had Latin, Spanish, French, German and Japanese. Schools whose parents pester them to have a high number of parents pushing for lots of AP courses are going to have Latin, Spanish, French, and German because there are well established AP courses for those (they were around at my high school). Surely there are other languages added to the AP pantheon now, but those will be newer, and it's going to take time. A school can only hire so many language instructors, and you can bet they'll want the most bang for their bucks in that department--which means I seriously doubt that most will support language instruction that doesn't potentially culminate in an AP exam.

Unless the district can't support an AP program at all, or is doing IB (which also has languages attached to it) or somesuch.

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That's awesome. Can I ask what state you're in? Are these regular public schools or charter schools?

I think qualified Spanish and French instructors are hard enough to find, how in the world are the school districts to find teachers in Arabic and Mandarin?

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I know quite well the difficulties and issues of learning Mandarin.

Well, we do have some districts in the general area that offer Mandarin and/or Arabic. So, it's not impossible to do, and every program of study doesn't necessarily need to be driven by the offering of AP exams.

We are finally starting to offer a few languages at the elementary level, which certainly makes sound educational sense in terms of actually learning the language. Given the tonal nature of Mandarin, the earlier the better. The district is deliberately choosing to offer German and Latin to the elementary school kids in an effort to get them hooked earlier, because very few kids want to take either in jr. high.

It just floors me how Eurocentric we still are in 2009 to the extent that we can't offer the most widely spoken language in the world in the district.

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Qualified Spanish and French teachers are not at all hard to find where I live.

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Well, I agree that it *shouldn't* be driven by that. However, we also live in a time of increasing budget cuts, less money from the feds, and falling revenues (property taxes) for schools. If your district at all considers parental input--the stuff that revolves around AP and other programs like it will often pay a key role in what is funded. People tend to vote to keep those things, even if their kids won't be participating. I've seen this first hand the past two years.

So no, it doesn't necessarily--but frankly that is often a reality. Especially in suburban districts. IME.

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We're in San Francisco, CA. Those are regular public schools, not charter. But the entire district is school choice---which boils down to no neighborhood schools and a lottery for all the desirable schools. Parents can put down up to 7 choices of schools and often don't get any of them. There are people every year who literally leave the city after the lottery is done if they didn't get a decent school. Last year, if you take away sibling preference, only 65 percent of parents got one of their seven choices for kindergarten.

It is great though that the schools are strong on the languages, a lot of it is because those languages are spoken at home for a lot of kids. (That's why there are actually more Cantonese programs in the city than Mandarin.)

Catherine

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Actually, Immersion, at least in our school district, is not that expensive. All the school needed to do was buy more text books. The classrooms are the same, the teachers get the same salary, supplies are the same, etc. In our school district, the exact same curriculum is taught for both Immersion and Traditional students, it is just some kids learn everything in Mandarin or Spanish while others learn it in English. Certainly, property taxes have not gone up due to Immersion. In fact, it has become a big money maker for the school district as so many kids open enroll into our district from neighboring communities and bring their school dollars with them. Local realtors will tell you, however, that the stellar quality of our school district is one reason property values have not fallen nearly as much as the rest of the state. People want to live here and will pay more to do so.

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But if they can't get kids to enroll in German or Latin AP exams or no AP exams in the first place, that doesn't make any sense at all.

We give them parental input every chance we get.