I took Latin in High school for 3 years, one daughter, and one son took Spanish, another French, third daughter now taking Latin for a 3rd year. I don’t think Spanish should be mandatory because I think latin is so useful in learning additional languages. I do think that there should be incentives for students to learn languages on their own and then “test” for credit for that knowledge. After I came home from 16 months in Guatemala, I was able to test out of 3 years of college Spanish. Another excellent program FREE on the web is Cafemocha.com. They have programs to learn languages, and then you can sign up to chat with someone from a foreign country who is a native speaker of your new language. My homeschooling son is learning German, and we had a girl from Romania contact him to practice her English. I love the concept of Free learning sites that are sponsored by advertisers.

This is one of the areas in which I lean more toward the conservative viewpoint than the liberal. I do think we should have English as our national language and learning other languages should remain optional as it always has been. In one way I also see this issue the same way I see religion in schools. Neither a religious belief nor a social philosophy should be infiltrated into our culture by putting them in the curriculums of our tax funded public schools. If a tax paying parent doesn’t want a child to learn creationism or Spanish, they should have that choice.

Yes, gosh yes! I can’t believe the no answers exceed the yes. However, maybe those answering no would prefer the language to be Mandarin which is the language spoken by the most people.

Europe teaches their kids all the languages from the countries around them - what is wrong with our exclusive attitude about English only?

The key word is ‘mandatory’. In Ireland, Irish is required from age 4 on (unless you arrive in the country after age 12). The government pays for every school- public and private- to provide a required minimum of 30 minutes of Irish class per day. There are government subsidized Irish language radio and television stations. Students are required to take Irish on their Leaving Certificate exams- used for college admissions- at the end of 12th grade. There is a whole culture of Irish camps in the summers to help the children develop the language by living in Irish only environments for 3 weeks (ask an Irish adult where they had their first kiss- for many, it’s in the gaeltacht [Irish speaking region]). Add in national pride in one’s own cultural heritage, and surely everybody is fluent in their native tongue, right? Wrong. For a variety of reasons (rehashed regularly in the media), only a small percentage of Irish people actually can speak more than the “cupla focail” (few words). In the last few years there has been an increase in schools in which all the teaching is in Irish, and Irish names for children are back in fashion, but in both primary and secondary schools (and I have children in both) most kids dread it. It is poorly taught and not part of their daily lives. My secondary school child takes Irish (required), a European language (required), and Latin. She finds the Latin the easiest and the most fun. Her Spanish teacher is Irish (not a native speaker) and is such a poor teacher that after a year in his class her Spanish was worse than it was at the beginning. Here is a blog page from somebody who is disgusted that Irish isn’t the dominant language in Ireland: http://www.finfacts.ie/finfactsblog/2006/12/cpla-focail-and-more-hypocri… Anyway, the point is that it’s all very well to say that it would be better if all American children were multilingual like the Belgians. But the example of Ireland suggests that imposing it from the top is unlikely to work. Ireland is a small, relatively homogenous country, that has shoveled billions into trying to revive their *own* language- with a stunning lack of success. It is hard to imagine that the kaleidscopic mosaic of America is going to buy into being forced to be bilingual English-Spanish.