Despite a lot of big talk from conservatives about national security, sound economic policies, and reforming education to make American children more competitive on the world stage, the Right has let us down on all three. As just one example, take the issue of foreign language education.
Americans need to speak foreign languages to compete in the world market and keep our country safe. In a stark illustration of this point, the movie Syriana features a scene where Arabic-speaking Chinese businessmen impress an Arab emir's son so much that he decides to cut out their American competitors. The US, feeling threatened, responds by assassinating the young leader - saving its interests in the short term, the film suggests, but ultimately setting the stage for future losses and chaos. The lesson is that military might cannot save our economy or our prestige. We must adapt, and to do so we must speak foreign languages.
Free market proponents argue that the private sector can do a better job at fulfilling our country's needs than the government can. If so, where are the ranks of multilingual Americans we need to maintain our prosperity and protect our interests? Only the government, through bold initiatives funding language-learning for children, can fill this need. Moreover, these initiatives shouldn't just promote language study for potential recruits into the military industrial complex - they should make effective language programs available to all American schoolchildren. How to fund it? Easy: include it in the defense budget if you have to. What will make us safer - the expensive upkeep of a few surplus nuclear weapons, or millions of globally fluent young Americans?

What's that? The whole world is learning English, so we don't need to learn their languages? You're wrong. Laziness doesn't justify putting ourselves at a disadvantage: if we wait for everyone to learn English, the rest of the world will be cutting deals with each other while we're cut off from ideas and markets. A variety of challenges loom on the horizon, including some we can't anticipate now - but we can anticipate that a broad population of multilingual youth will be able to meet those challenges.
Now, I'm not saying we need increased funding for the languages currently taught in most schools. We need to tone down our romance (pun intended) with languages like French and Italian, and concentrate on learning the languages with the most speakers: Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic, as well as Russian and other Asian languages. We also need to concentrate more on critical areas like Central Asia.
Language learning seems to be expanding at the university level. But myriad studies have shown that young children learn languages more quickly than adults. So we need to start with kids as soon as possible. With curricula beginning at the first grade level, imagine how skilled your child could be in Chinese or Arabic or Hindi by the age of sixteen. With more Americans speaking foreign languages, we'll be sure to write better textbooks, produce more American language teachers, and develop more cross-cultural programs, giving our kids the chance to practice their language skills abroad. It's a positive feedback loop. In the end, we'll reap the benefits everywhere from industry to journalism to the State Department as Americans fan out around the globe in search of new ideas, new contacts, and new problems to solve.
And it doesn't have to be just foreign languages. Why not start kids on programming languages when they're in elementary school? The benefits are obvious, not only for individuals but for our society.
The entire thrust of American education needs to change, but that's especially obvious in our attitude toward languages. We need to take a cue from the rest of the world, much of which is multilingual, and give our kids the 21st century education they deserve.
</img> </img> </img>


(Source Link)