Aurgh! Your comment is on one hand something I really want to respond to, yet on the other hand difficult for me to respond to well.<p><i>&#62; At a higher education level (say College on up) I would be strongly inclined to agree with you. Give the students freedom and they will make the right choices for themselves, and they will be the only ones to live with it if they don't.
&#62; At the basic education level (high school and below), this is precisely when society is teaching its children what it needs to continue its culture.</i><p>Background: I am in high school.<p>Anyway, I've come up against this barrier so much and it drives me crazy. Here, like in most American high schools, society isn't teaching us anything. It's teaching us to hate the 'mandatory' subjects, because everyone has to take them, and thus the teachers can't teach it well because 3/4 of their classes are utterly uninterested. To be honest, I despise my world history class. And it's not because it's history - I'm fine with history, in face, I enjoy learning about it. It's because it's <i>mandatory</i>, which means <i>everyone</i> takes it, so in the end, everyone suffers.<p>With the AP level course system that exists in the USA, you're taking  college-level courses in high school. Why should high school students have to suffer any more than college students?<p>&#62; Most students at this age do not have the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about what they should learn, and moreover society has a vested interest in ensuring that its young people meet certain minimums.<p>This is even harder to argue with, because of the "most". I guess it's that old argument: would you rather allow the more gifted to excel, or everyone be held at the same level (with that level being slightly higher than had you went with the other option)? And, honestly, it isn't 'society' - society isn't doing anything. It's the school system, a bureaucratized administration incapable of seeing the system from the students perspective and incapable of creating a true institution of learning in which the students who <i>want</i> to learn at a decent rate <i>can</i>.<p>Ugh, sorry for this rant. It's just been bothering me for the past two years, because high school is <i>so goddamn constrained and mandatory</i> it's angering. Instead of learning, I have to sit through things I already know and listen to incompetent teachers talk about irrelevant topics.<p>I guess I should add something related to the original topic. I speak two languages fluently, and learned Spanish in high school for four years, then promptly dropped it. Why? Because even though I live in an area with easily 30% Spanish-speakers, I don't ever need to use it. Ever! And if I try to practice it, the Spanish-speakers would just rather speak English, because a lot of them are more comfortable talking to me in English. My point: in almost all places in the USA, other languages are useless. Now, in my own time, outside of school, I've learned some Portuguese, because I play capoeira and my instructor and students learning it along with me speak it all the time. My second point: when you need to, you will learn a language.