Unpopular Opinion
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Why bother? I would have to drive 22 hours straight to get to a location where English wasn't the primary language. This isn't Europe where the language changes faster than the timezones.
A lot of culture is locked behind even learning the basics of whatever language that culture speaks. It'd be awesome for monolingual Americans to learn the other language that exists in their area just for understanding alone.
Language learning is easy, especially for children and they also have plenty time in school to do so. A lot of problems come directly from unwillingness/lack of understanding of cultures that are pretty similar in the first place.
"Why bother?" can be said about a lot of the school system in the US, knowing a little about a language can go a long way and doesn't impact the rest of the learning.
I'm surrounded by a hundred cultures that all natively speak English at the moment. Once I run out of those, I'll probably give Spanish a try.
The thing is that culture with a shared language will homogenise or just be way more homogeneous than without one. Same for culture inside a shared nationality. This further perspective shift acquired via engaging in more different culture is useful, especially I find for critically evaluating news, politics,media and the like.
The perspective told in any other language than English is less sometimes much less integrated into the hegemony associatet with English. And seeing hegemony is much easier if you can by way of language switching step out of the one you've previously lived under.
There are of course other ways for this kind of perspective switching than learning a language, but having it be such a natural part of your life is in the long run easier.
So from the perspective of an education system in a supposedly democratic society what the op argues for makes a lot of sense, starting early with a 2nd language would likely make the US school system better. And I mean really early, nowadays here we start the 2nd language education with first grade, and the 3rd language with 5th grade.