This should be about it.

“As the EU brought along ERASMUS and Schengen, it also brought along a new age of international cooperation for many new member states. It has also brought up the problem of having many different languages in a relatively small area. One of the many topics that have been raised due to this has been learning different languages in school - whether it should be mandatory or voluntary, should it be done at all?

People in Eastern Europe have no problem answering this, on the one side, there are countries that have German or something extremely similar to German as the native language, and most of the English-speaking world. On the other side they border with the enormous Russia, that has at certain points in history forced Russian culture, including the language, to be incorporated local cultures, sometimes to extreme extent. Most young people in these countries learn English and Russian at school, however well pupils actually communicate in these languages differs a lot, dependant on the pupils' personal background (nationality of self, or of parents, or of closest acquaintances, for instance), motivation, abilities, etc. Often enough, by the end of secondary school, the young graduate will have learned at least 3 foreign languages.

But countries where the native language happens to be a popular language throughout the entire world, or our small corner of it at the very least, can be reluctant to 'force' their young to study a foreign language that many would probably never use. This is painfully obvious in the United States, but for the sake of this topic, let's limit ourselves to the EU.

Since English is the most popular language within the EU, most young Frenchmen and Germans learn it anyways, but England is a problem. For every other country, the foreign language that should most probably definitely be taught at school would be English, but in England, that is no longer a foreign language. While learning Welsh would be interesting, it probably would not be very practical. The languages that could be of use for more than an insignificant minority, would be French and German. But even so, learning French would perhaps yield better results than learning German. After all, learning more languages before adulthood has proved to be an excellent method of developing a systematic mind that can cope with huge amounts of input even at old age. Furthermore, polyglots generally have higher IQ. This may lead to other perks, such as long life^[1] or increased rate of learning new techniques to keep up with the changing requirements for certain positions of employment.

All in all, the EU has played an important role in opening borders and encouraging cooperation beyond borders, but it has barely changed the need to learn languages. The languages taught may have changed, but foreign languages should be taught at all times (in the sense of past, present, and future) to schoolchildren, from primary school to secondary school at the very least. Often enough during university studies, one has to learn an additional language, such as Latin, anyways. Perhaps the language that is taught is not that important as a whole, but the process of learning a language most definitely is important and has significant positive consequences.”

 

The quotation marks are there for a reason yet again. The Status shall be Quo again soon.

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