Sweet Briar College (Virginia, independent, women's college) cutting its German program.

[no_hypocrisy]

Since its inception, German has always been taught and offered as a major both as a language and literature. Three years ago, Italian was cut.

It's a troubling trend to see arts, humanities, and languages as dispensable.

[hlthe2b]

1. Yes indeed.. We should be requiring foreign language througout primary school education- college IMO

Heavens.. And we wonder why jobs are being outsourced. sigh....

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. I traveled in Scandinavia last summer, and although I speak a bit of pidgin Norwegian,

I rarely had to use it, as opposed to when I went as a teenager.

In fact, when I was a teenager, I'd ask store clerks and the like, "Snakker du engelsk?" and about the time, the answer would be "Nej." But this time, I stopped asking, because people actually seemed offended that I thought they might not speak English.

Now everyone under the age of 50 or so speaks English and at least one other language. According to my relatives, they now start English in first grade.

When I was in Iceland, I ended up in one tour group that was about half English-speakers and half German-speakers, so the guide gave his spiel in both languages. His English was perfect, and since I grew up with German-speaking relatives, I could tell that his German was pretty good, too.

It's a shame to drop German. It's not only the official language of two countries (Germany, Austria) and one of the official languages of a third (Switzerland), but according to people I know who have traveled in Eastern Europe, it's a handy second language to know there, because people who don't speak English often speak German. (My church in Portland took in a couple of families of Bosnian refugees in the 1990s, and we German speakers had to do the communicating.)

[CTyankee]

3. My grandson's elementary school foreign language immersion program is not recruiting for

German kindergarten. They will go through sixth grade in German for the existing class but the German class will disappear.

My grandson's Italian program is doing pretty well. They keep getting the lower grade class populated so so far so good. He is going into 3rd grade in the fall.

The school is meeting with success for the upcoming inauguration of its newest addition, French. So many folks in the LA area want their kids to learn French and there are only private schools that start the little ones off and take them through in French. Our elementary school in Glendale is a magnet school for those families drawn to having their kids start another language (or keep them fluent if a parent speaks the other language in the home).