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Parlez vous Français?
Originally published on Tumblr.
What else do you remember from four years of French classes? Probably not much.
I’m having coffee in a hotel in Oaxaca, and I’m surprised by how well my waiter speaks English. Learning English is hard. He’s practically mastered it. If he weren’t a waiter in a fancy hotel, he’d probably have another job in the tourism industry.
In 2006, the APPO protests (and their repression) put an end to tourism in the province. Eight years later, the industry is still recovering. Many restaurants and hotels shut down and never reopened. If that happens again, my waiter won’t have a job that leverages his hard-earned skill.
So why did he learn English? Probably because he was smart, and working with tourists was a great way to earn a living. Being able to speak to them — or at least some of them — is a necessary skill. It may be necessary today, but it won’t be for long.
If instead of spending years learning and perfecting his English, my waiter had put the same amount of effort into learning some computer languages and perfecting programming techniques, he’d be earning a lot more money today. And his future would be brighter, and less uncertain.
A decade ago few people realized how important it was to be able to build software. Today, many do, but apparently not the people who decide what our children should be taught.
In Mexico, most children are taught some English in school. Very few learn to program. The US is no different. Our children are still being taught Spanish, French, German, and Mandarin instead of Python, Ruby, Go, and C. For almost all of them, learning another human language is a waste of intellectual energy.
Learning English is hard. Learning any foreign language is hard, and becoming more and more unnecessary. How many of us live in a bilingual world? Very few. How many of us learn a language and then use it to really delve into other cultures? Almost none of us. And the benefit gained from being able to “speak the language” when we travel is being eradicated by technology.
The last time I was in China I used an iPhone app that translated my spoken English into spoken Mandarin, and my interlocutors’ spoken Mandarin into spoken English. I had no trouble getting around, ordering food, and gathering basic information about my surroundings. I don’t know how long I would have to study Mandarin to reach that app’s level of proficiency. Years no doubt. How long before the equivalent is available for hundreds languages and dialects?
Advances in speech and language processing are happening at a breathtaking pace. Technology is making learning other languages unnecessary. So how can we justify forcing our children to study them in school when they’ll graduate with dozens of UN-grade translators in their pocket? We can’t, and we should really start thinking about what else they could be doing with that time and energy.
¿Habla usted Español?
Don’t worry, it doesn’t really matter.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn.