Bilingual Education & Foreign Language Instruction Are Ridiculous

I think some larger points on children’s cognitive development are missed in this perspective. We use like less than 95% of our brains anyway, any net loss of learning another language or learning another subject matter or developing another part of the brain is quite minimal in the big picture. Developing multiple parts of the brain and multiple cognitive skills is general is a much greater benefit to overall thinking than the loss of specialization in 1 part of the brain—particularly for young people. Kids brains are really like sponges, and the more stimulation--be in math, spatial, lingual (multiple), art, kinetic, etc, is far more often than not a good thing for the child relative to specialization in a language or narrow set of thinking activities.

Regarding bilinguals and multilinguals specifically, they are generally linguistically more advanced because they essentially are better able to make distinctions between words as symbols rather than as exact representations of objects. This is a linguistic benefit even in the dominant or 1st language. Additionally, multi-lingualism helps some kinds of thinking that isn’t even intuitive, like exact mathematical and other problem solving tasks—probably also tracing the effect of having better word-object distinctions.

 

I'm awful at learning foreign languages. I took two years of German in High School and made a D each quarter. Never even tried to take a foreign language in College. The only way I've ever been able to be successful at it is by spending serious time in a foreign country. I spent three months in Israel several years ago, and by the end of the visit, I was able to speak Hebrew fairly well. I'm sure it sounded like crap to Israelis, and I'm sure it had lots of grammatical errors, but it got me by in their country.