Cutting German

In a strange paradox for a School District that's about to embark on a veritable orgy of construction and expansion, the Iowa City Community School District announced a series of budget cuts last week that include, amongst other things, phasing out Foreign Language for 7th Graders and phasing out German for all grades.

Students and supporters of German have launched an effort to try and save their favorite language- but the Superintendent is holding firm (for now) saying that all cuts are final.

I love foreign languages.  I took two of them in high school (French and Spanish) and picked up a few more in college (Portuguese, Swahili and two semesters of Hindi and one mind meltingly hard semester of Arabic.)   I think foreign languages are incredibly important and to be honest, in a perfect world, they'd be taught through elementary school and straight through high school.  In fact, I desperately miss using my foreign language skills and if I go back to school for anything, there's a decent chance it'll be for linguistics or to pick up a major or two in a foreign language.

In a global economy and an increasingly interconnected world, we need more foreign languages not less.  You can take all the anthropology, history and cultural awareness classes you want- you could collect whole majors from every country you could think of with the word 'Studies' after them and the 100% best way to understand a culture is to learn the language that they speak.

So, for all those reasons, this is an incredibly stupid decision that I absolutely disagree with.  Personally, of all the things I allegedly learned in high school, algebra is probably the one with the least practical application in my education hence- so I would cut anything, it would probably be math.  But that's just me.

Despite my love of foreign language however, I can sort of kind of understand why German got the big heave-ho.  It was never the most popular foreign language class even when I was in high school and you were left with the distinct impression that German was taught because so many of the immigrants that originally settled Iowa were German in origin.   Really, the decline of German has probably been coming for the better part of a century- when the US entered World War I and got all persnickety about people with German sounding names and speaking too much German, I would imagine that began the decline of German-language newspapers and a lot of it's every day use in homes and businesses.

Today, while it is the language of Europe's biggest and most stable economy, you can make the argument that it would be a good language to learn if you wanted to major in International Business- problem is that you can make better arguments for a dozen or so other languages that fit the bill as well. My personal criteria for foreign language is what kind of geographic or population area you're picking up when you learn one.  So, Spanish?  Gets you the majority of Latin America (with the exception of Brazil, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana)- French gets you large chunks of Africa, bits of Southeast Asia, not to mention France.  Even Portuguese gets you Brazil, Portugal, Lusophone Africa,- Chinese and Hindi will get you a billion people a piece, but what does German get you?

Germany and Switzerland.  Not that much, geographically speaking.

That doesn't mean it's not important.  That doesn't mean people shouldn't have the opportunity to learn it.  It just means that, as languages go, it's got limited mileage, so to speak. Alas, I have a feeling that's why the ICCSD is saying auf wiedersein to German.