Foreign Language: Bring it Home!

President Barack Obama wished to bridge the divide, charging parents to make ALL children bilingual because he inherently knows the opposite desire holds true. Parents would rather phase other languages out and make this a solely English-speaking country. Obama’s charge makes logical and moral sense to those of us who listened, but has no fertile ground to take root.

Certainly, schools have not listened to that charge. Foreign-language study is on the decline, and educators shrug. Schools don’t trim back on foreign-language study the way it does the arts; it is not a matter of austerity measures and sad necessity. Rather, there is a dearth of both enrollment and of teachers—a more dire problem. Schools cannot staff foreign language classes; then students don’t want to take foreign language classes; schools do not earnestly look for or train foreign-language teachers . . . the spiral is self-evident.