Being the early morning muser I am, this morning I cast my mind back to my high school days, and landed on a bit of educational stupidity I'd almost forgotten about. Now, it's been several years since I was in school, so things could have changed in the meantime, but I rather doubt it. (I don't doubt, however, that a lot of schools were better in this regard than mine was...)

My school's foreign language curriculum was an armpit. Mind you, I went to school in a redneck town in the middle of Texas, so expecting a choice offering of languages that are really fun to learn would be too much to ask for...but I really think they could have done better than this.

When I attended school there, three languages were offered: Spanish, German, and Latin. On the surface, this doesn't seem so unreasonable, right? Let's take a closer look...

Latin: Why? I really fail to comprehend the reasoning behind teaching Latin in high school. The only people who would benefit from learning Latin are those going into science, medicine, or law. In a small redneck town in Texas, that accounts for less than a quarter of each graduating class. It could be argued that learning Latin provides a basis for learning other languages, but even that doesn't lend validity to teaching it in high school--Latin should be a collegiate offering, aimed at students with loftier career goals.

German: This is the only language in the curriculum that made sense. The majority of those living in the town were either of German or Czech descent, German is still widely spoken in the world, and also has practical applications in engineering fields.

But what about Spanish, you say? Makes sense to teach Spanish in central Texas, doesn't it? Spanish is even more widely spoken than German, right?

Ostensibly, yes. But this is where we run into the Illogic Factor.

I never took the Spanish courses myself, because I had a distaste for the rather unsavory Hispanic element in my school (This is not a racist comment. I'm talking greasy, aggressive, abusive, quasi-legitimate knife gang types here), but I heard the horror stories. It seems that all the Mexican kids who took the Spanish course were flunking miserably, despite being fluent in Spanish already.

So what went wrong?

The curriculum was teaching *Spanish* Spanish. Which is fine if you're on the East coast, or even on the upper West coast, or perhaps even in Florida, but in Texas, it doesn't make *sense* to teach Spanish Spanish. It wouldn't make sense to teach it in California, either.

The point of learning Spanish at all, in my opinion, is to be able to communicate with Spanish-speaking people. What good is Spanish Spanish going to do you, though, when all the Spanish-speaking people you are liable to encounter speak *MEXICAN* Spanish?

The sad part is that the Spanish teacher herself was a native Mexican, and yet she adhered to the curriculum rather than appealing for a change. To her credit, she DID try to flavor her classes (again, I was never IN her class, I just heard second and third-hand accounts) with culture and a bit of dialect information, but on the whole it just wasn't enough to make the difference.

Sometimes, I just have to wonder what goes through the minds of the people who make the rules. I often wonder if they're even playing the same game as the rest of us.

-Trunks (No habla Espanol...)