I mean the whole school I went through kept nailing in our heads how much a foreign language would benefit you. I guess this went under the noses of whoever like teaching kids to balance a checkbook.
I mean the whole school I went through kept nailing in our heads how much a foreign language would benefit you. I guess this went under the noses of whoever like teaching kids to balance a checkbook.
Japan tries to teach everyone English and it does not work well. Most people don’t want to learn it and the way they teach it is also to a test not to communication. I have no faith that the same wouldn’t happen in the US.
The Netherlands teaches everyone English and it works.
You also have a lot more contact with English speakers and media to consume in it. Japan localizes everything and there are few jobs where being multilingual actually matters (and those are usually specialized roles outside of hospitality). There are a lot of problems with the way Japan does its English education which does factor into it, but people do not see it as useful, don’t want to use it, and almost never use it (very little overseas travel with most going to Hawaii and Guam which have Japanese language support all over the place).
I say this as someone working on his 5th serious language (with a smattering of Spanish, Albanian, and Hebrew I just puttered around with a bit) and strongly believe that teaching kids languages is a good thing for a variety of reasons.
I have zero faith that the national, state, county, and municipality levels could come together to have something that is justified, works, and is properly-implemented. Tax-payers would also not want to foot the bill for what many would consider useless. Not that many people in the US have passports, either, and a lot that do travel to Canada where English is widely spoken, the UK, etc.