The thing is that culture with a shared language will homogenise or just be way more homogeneous than without one. Same for culture inside a shared nationality. This further perspective shift acquired via engaging in more different culture is useful, especially I find for critically evaluating news, politics,media and the like.
The perspective told in any other language than English is less sometimes much less integrated into the hegemony associatet with English. And seeing hegemony is much easier if you can by way of language switching step out of the one you’ve previously lived under.
There are of course other ways for this kind of perspective switching than learning a language, but having it be such a natural part of your life is in the long run easier.
So from the perspective of an education system in a supposedly democratic society what the op argues for makes a lot of sense, starting early with a 2nd language would likely make the US school system better. And I mean really early, nowadays here we start the 2nd language education with first grade, and the 3rd language with 5th grade.
I’m surrounded by a hundred cultures that all natively speak English at the moment. Once I run out of those, I’ll probably give Spanish a try.
The thing is that culture with a shared language will homogenise or just be way more homogeneous than without one. Same for culture inside a shared nationality. This further perspective shift acquired via engaging in more different culture is useful, especially I find for critically evaluating news, politics,media and the like.
The perspective told in any other language than English is less sometimes much less integrated into the hegemony associatet with English. And seeing hegemony is much easier if you can by way of language switching step out of the one you’ve previously lived under.
There are of course other ways for this kind of perspective switching than learning a language, but having it be such a natural part of your life is in the long run easier.
So from the perspective of an education system in a supposedly democratic society what the op argues for makes a lot of sense, starting early with a 2nd language would likely make the US school system better. And I mean really early, nowadays here we start the 2nd language education with first grade, and the 3rd language with 5th grade.