Second language instruction in my old middle and high school, way back when.

[randomness]

My old middle school started us on a second language in sixth grade. This was pretty good for the time. You had the choice of French or Spanish. In ninth grade, when we got to high school, they added German and Latin.

It struck me today that this was an odd choice of languages for a town that had a plurality, if not a majority, of Italian-Americans. If you went by ethnicity, I'd think you'd have gone with Italian and Irish as your elective languages. (Nearly all the Italian, Irish, and Polish kids were being raised Catholic, so that might have had something to do with why they offered Latin.)

Clearly there were practical issues. Finding teachers would have been harder. Most of the students were at least a generation or two away from actually using the language at home. Generally, the Italian kids I grew up with couldn't manage any more than a few curses in Italian, and that only in Neapolitan dialect. So you'd have to deal with the whole Neapolitan vs. standard Italian issue. Some kids actually did speak it at home, so you'd have to produce skill-appropriate classes for them as well.

And back then, there was still some sentiment among immigrants that when you came to America you got rid of your old language as a part of assimilation rather than hone it as another useful skill. So it's certainly possible that there wasn't anywhere near as much interest as there would be today.

But thinking back from the early 21st century at the apathetic kids in my classes, I can't help thinking you'd have gotten more engagement if you'd actually offered languages that the kids cared about, as opposed to teaching them languages that some upper-middle class people considered "cultured".

At least we had second language instruction.

Comments

[cerebralpaladin.livejournal.com]

I'm deeply skeptical about claims about "all public schools in the US" prior to roughly the 1980s. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare wasn't created until 1949; the Department of Education wasn't spun off into its own federal department until 1980. Throughout US history, and to a very significant degree even today, education decisions were state and local level decisions. So it seems much more likely that most US public schools or that all public schools in NYS or whatever offered French, Spanish, and German than that all public schools everywhere did anything. Also, there was hostility to Romance language instruction in various places because of anti-Catholicism, as well as anti-German sentiment during and after WW1. Nebraska, at least, passed a law in 1919 prohibiting all foreign language instruction (as well as all instruction in foreign languages) in private or public schools; that law got struck down as applied to private schools in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), but I suspect that it would have been upheld as applied to public schools.

In my school's case, French, Spanish, and German were all offered starting in 7th grade, with Italian added in 9th grade. My town also had a very large Italian-American population, but the weird effect of only offering Italian in 9th grade (and encouraging students who might be interested in taking it to take Spanish or French first) was that the Italian courses were basically filled with the worst students in the school--students who had done really badly in Spanish, and decided that starting over at the 1 level was better than continuing on--and then a handful of other students who for whatever reason REALLY wanted to learn Italian, or ended up in a weird place with their language instruction and decided to start over. It was an odd set up.

[drwex]

My central-NJ district offered German alongside French, Spanish, and Italian at the high school level in the late 1970s. After one year Italian was dropped because the person who taught it moved on and the school couldn't find someone fluent in the language and willing to teach it. YMMV as always.