The one-dimensional mentality of anti-intellectualism is absurd. I have heard parents outside of our school but in my community talk down French Immersion programs (versus English schooling) saying that people put their children in for the wrong reasons. I don’t know what the explicit reasons were in this case, but I am assuming that the other parent means academic overachievement.
Learning calculus or French can be beneficial, especially when the glass ceiling in certain workplaces is whether or not you’re bilingual. However, the point that’s getting missed is the metaexperience that consciously or subconsciously shapes the way the child interacts with the world later on.
In middle school my foreign language choices were Spanish, French, or Latin. I picked Latin because it was cool. When it came time to talk about subordinate clauses and noun cases in English, Spanish, and French, what I'd learned in Latin was invaluable. It's like learning a purely functional style programming language versus an imperative one: they'll both inform how you think about solving problems in the other. Getting really good at another language is good because it makes you better at thinking about grammar.
I question the "like learning a purely functional style programming language" part of this but Latin did have its advantages. Many English words are derived from Latin roots (but I didn't study Greek and that is the second great source!8-(()
I likely would have been better off taking Spanish but I avoided that b/c half my class were fluent in Spanish already and I had to maintain a decent grade.
counterpoint: I did 3 years of Latin and it only helped me with SATs and/or sounding legit while playing Crusader Kings II
shoulda done French or Spanish. yeah there is some shared Latin roots there but that doesn't magically make it simple to pick up the languages. Hell, Italian might have been a better choice.
Weirdly my mom said that Portuguese Portuguese is the closest language to Latin that she'd ever encountered, not French or Italian or Spanish. My high school required an ancient and modern language, so I did French and Latin, then dropped Latin and picked up Spanish because it's kind of wild not to know any Spanish in the US. When learning French it helped with roots, sure, but it really helped with knowing how subordinate clauses work, why you'd use the subjunctive, that kind of thing.
In high school, I thought my French classes were mostly pointless, but then 14 years later, I moved to Paris where I have been living ever since, which is something I never could have imagined as a teenager. It's hard to predict what knowledge will end up being useful. To be fair, I had to mostly reteach myself French when I moved here, so I guess the real lesson is that it's useful to be a strong autodidact.
Where I live (Oregon, USA) there are very few jobs that require it but a lot of jobs where speaking a second language might get you hired over someone else.
Most jobs that are focused on interacting with people benefit from speaking a second language if it’s a common language in your community: nursing, teaching, customer service, social work, etc.
I’ve seen job listings mention it as a nice-to-have and know bilingual friends who have gotten those jobs.
I only speak one language well but I wish I spoke more. I hope my son (and future other kids) learn multiple languages. But not for job/economic reasons: it just seems good for your brain and interesting for how you think about the world.
>it just seems good for your brain and interesting for how you think about the world.
I am fluent in 3 languages, and while it is convenient, I assume claims about it being "good for your brain" are just as pseudoscience-y as all the other claims about what is good for the brain.
One of the languages I know doesn't even use a Latin alphabet, and I spent many hours learning it when I was little. And it's basically useless (obviously just my experience) except for communicating with older family members. Once they pass away in ~3 decades, I doubt I use it again.
Actually, the biggest incentive for me to teach my kids that language is so that we have a secret way of communicating in public (in the US). But I have failed so far, because it's just a lot of work to teach kids another language when you and your spouse prefer to speak in another, and so the kids are not completely immersed in it.
Because there are few if any good metrics for evaluating the brain’s performance and connecting it to isolated factors, and the experiments are near impossible to replicate. Brain related research is also some of the easiest to churn into clickbait, since it rarely gets into the nitty gritty of molecular interactions.
>Public Significance Statement—The idea that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in cognitive control functions seems to have already been accepted by the popular media and educators, because of a number of influential studies reporting a bilingual advantage. Our thorough meta-analysis, however, suggests that healthy bilingual adults do not have such a cognitive control advantage. The synthesis of 152 studies and 891 comparisons and several moderator variables does not show systematic advantages across the analyzed cognitive domains, tasks, or bilingual population
I wonder. In my world, almost everyone I know is bilingual and I would not have met them and worked with them otherwise. So many of my coworkers are from countries where English is not required but they were fortunate to pick it up as a 2nd language for one reason or another and now work in a high paying company that requires English.
Still, I get, over all, the number is small. They could have all had a different career in their native language.
Knowing English as a second language and Dutch as a first language is different than knowing, for example, Dutch as a second language and English as a first.
I know people in both camps. I have more respect for English speakers learning Dutch than for Dutch speakers learning English. Even though I respect both. But the simple truth is: there's a lot of incentive to learn English. There is not a lot of incentive to learn Dutch.
The Foreign Service Institute has a language difficulty rating, based on the first language of a speaker, to estimate the number of class hours needed to achieve fluency in English.
Learning English from Dutch is 24-30 weeks whereas from German is 36 weeks. I am assuming some degree of reciprocity but maybe not.
One example: I worked for an Alphabet company with some very, very accomplished people. When the drawdown on the project came, the people who were bi- or multi-lingual all kept their jobs. They were more useful in more situations for a multinational project. The 36 people let go probably wish they'd spent a little more time studying Japanese, Spanish or Norwegian.
I don't think it's anti-inellectual. You're not considering that students can be taught something else. I would promote that most students should be taught probability and statistics instead of calculus.
Learning calculus or French can be beneficial, especially when the glass ceiling in certain workplaces is whether or not you’re bilingual. However, the point that’s getting missed is the metaexperience that consciously or subconsciously shapes the way the child interacts with the world later on.