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We homeschool our kid but this might be fraying our nerves too much.
The public schools here are generally terrible, and the private schools are either religious or hippie-woo garbage that I don't want to waste time at.
There are a handful of Immersion schools, however. Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.
We're white but my thinking is
Yes this is racist. But also... accurate? Thoughts?
We send our kids to a Spanish immersion public school. I'd say points 1-5 are all true at our school.
I'd also wager that you are underrating Spanish's "usefulness". Some pros:
Learning to read Spanish is much easier than learning to read English. My oldest (7) started reading Spanish first and that made reading English much easier. My next oldest (4) is just starting the reading process, and he can read much better in Spanish as well.
Lots of "fancy" words in English are "simple" words in Spanish. When my kids speak English, they use words like "prefer" (instead of like), "ignorant" (instead of stupid), etc and I regularly get comments from adults about how smart my kids sound. These adults then go on to treat my kids better.
Hispanics love to see a bunch of little white kids talking Spanish, and become "instant friends" with them. I'm sure Chinese speakers would love it just as much, but there's a lot fewer.
Since you said downthread you already speak some Spanish, you'll actually be able to help your kids learn. You'll also learn some yourself, which makes being with them more fun. Lots of parents complain about having to listen to The Wheels on the Bus 1000x as a parent, but it's much more fun if it's in a language you are learning and actually benefiting from the repetition.
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Why ask the internet about generalities instead of going to an orientation for the actual and specific schools in your area? Even if the information you get here is absolutely statistically true, it means jack all if your schools buck the trend in some fashion.
Yes, this is racist - about schools, not people. You’re in a position to judge them on the contents of their characters, and instead are asking strangers to judge them by the colors you believe will be on their students. Morality, who cares; but why are you hamstringing yourself?
I'm not asking the internet. I'm asking themotte.org.
Also, it's still an expense to go visit all of the schools. If a dozen people here said "lol no, this is bad, here's why" and nobody had a convincing counterargument I would not bother.
The responses here have been helpful!
What’s the cultural distance between Spain and Latin America compared to the USA (I assume this is where you are)? I speak both Japanese and Chinese but not Spanish (and have only ever visited the United States), so I may have a skewed view, but it seems like the cultural distance between the States and the East Asian countries is larger than the States and Spain or Latin America.
It might be worth learning the East Asian languages if you want to expose your child to a significantly different culture as part of a broad liberal-arts-ish education.
I know I used to entertain learning other languages to read their literature. Who knows, I might try to pick up another language even this late in life!
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Just on the language piece, Spanish is absolutely and infinitely more useful in the US. Wikipedia says that in the US it’s something like 42 million vs 3.5 million and the Spanish one feels like maybe even an underestimate. I’m not saying Chinese is useless - personally I’d view it as #2 most useful second language? But a 10-fold difference increase in speaking opportunities is pretty stark. Frankly everything after that falls off pretty quickly in usefulness, possibly with the exception of French, where the point of learning is more for its own sake rather than an actual expected ROI of any kind. (They say that a second language eventually can help mental development, after a brief confusion period depending on the age, so language of any kind might still be a mild net benefit even without a lasting return, but the significance of this is debated.)
You may have a point about the Chinese school. It’s not all sunshine and roses though, as noted below, but I’d say directionally it sounds like an idea worth exploring for sure.
I'm okay at Spanish and haven't found it very useful. Whereas I feel like I'm somewhat blind to one of the largest cultural and geopolitical transformations of our time by not being able to understand Chinese.
See my other comment but I'm puzzled that you'd feel Chinese is a bigger cultural transformation when there are more Spanish speakers, as a percentage of the population, than there are Black people in the US. I might be biased from living in the West, though.
I could imagine 20 years from now where an increasing share of international business is done in Chinese rather than English, I guess.
It's not a huge win, just possibly more useful than Spanish.
I will be very interested to see if English persists as a lingua franca for business even if the US and UK have their influence significantly decline. It may be that English has hit a critical mass among businessmen that it is self-sustaining, though I'm not totally confident this is the case (and perhaps AI translation is already at a point where it becomes less necessary on an everyday level). For example, if someone from Japan wants to talk with someone from Germany, chances are they do so in English, right? The nature of international trade is often such that major bilateral partners only covers a smallish percentage of the total, so a mutually common language is useful for practical reasons. Though that dynamic will have more to do with how large Chinese bilateral trade links grow in other countries.
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Speaking spanish is the only other language as an American that doesn't correspond with an increase in income, though (I believe this fact is from a freakonomics podcast ten years ago).
It's definitely true that most Spanish-only-speakers have developed coping strategies already, or are bilingual to an acceptable extent, so the returns aren't as starkly defined as with other languages. However, it does expand your ability to vacation in most all of the hemisphere, allows you to be a better "neighbor", and furthermore allows you to communicate somewhat acceptably with those who speak Italian or Portuguese (French to a more limited extent), so there's that extra marginal effect too. I just yesterday had a whole conversation with someone from Brazil, cross-language with him in Portuguese and me in Spanish, and it was pretty effective. So you kind of get 1 + 2 * (1/2) languages for the price of one. On top of that, since the linguistic roots are so similar, learning Spanish also has the effect of boosting English vocabulary (and vice-versa)! It's extremely common for regular-use Spanish words to have less-used English equivalents. As a trivial example, the word for "to chew" in Spanish is "masticar", which you might recognize as related to the more archaic English word "masticate" with an identical meaning. By contrast, Chinese offers practically zero cross-over knowledge in vocabulary, the script itself, and some intonation.
Again Chinese is definitely #2 on that list of most-useful languages, though. It's just hard to argue with the numbers. Most people rarely leave the country, and even if your Spanish is functionally decorative with 80% of all Spanish-speakers, there's still twice as many Spanish-speakers where it would be useful as there are Chinese speakers domestically (for which similar arguments could be made anyways). Sure, there are still 2-3 times as many global speakers of Chinese, but IMO you really need to weight that heavily by exposure chance. An unused language is still vaguely helpful developmentally as I mentioned above, or as a hobby, and might get you some attention from women, but overall it would still be a poor investment to learn a language never used.
Status-wise, there's no doubt Spanish has a lower socioeconomic association, so if you're trying to raise your kid to me a major climber, Chinese might be better if that's your primary goal. However, Spanish is the kinder and more practical option. So it might come down to values/priorities in some sense.
I would say the argument for Chinese immersion over Spanish immersion is that it's a lot easier for an adult English-speaker to pick up Spanish down the line if they have a need for or interest in it, whereas they will be unlikely to ever master Chinese pronunciation unless they were exposed to the language at an early age.
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At least in my part of the US, there is a niche for small business owners who use Spanish to communicate with (some of) their workers. This may be less status than you are looking for (construction contractors, restaurant franchise owners, ranchers), but it is something.
Analogously, I've at least heard of Chinese-speakers being pulled in to negotiate with "the factory" (mainland or Taiwan) building products.
On the gripping hand, our Brave New World today could easily spell major changes in both of these with changes in immigration and tariffs, so my confidence would be low.
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Surely learning Georgian is unlikely to increase your earning power meaningfully, so the claim must be about correlation, not causation. Most Americans who speak Spanish are Latinos, and Latinos tend to make below-average incomes. Most people who speak other languages are either positively selected immigrants, or natives who were smart and conscientious enough to learn another language as adults. So they tend to make more.
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I can semi-concur with you here. I went to a French immersion school in a decently black area as a kid, and it was a far better school than its demographics would suggest. Most of the black kids were either immigrants from Francophone Africa or otherwise upper-middle class, and while it still wasn't private-school quality, it seemed a hell of a lot better than the surrounding public schools.
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Your #5 makes me think that you might've stumbled on some serious alpha here. You might be getting private-school quality peers for your children at discounted prices (assuming that immersion language school is cheaper than full-on private school).
I think you, and most other reasonable folks can see as plain as day how the demographics of your child's friends will influence educational and, consequently, life outcomes, so there's nothing racist about that.
As an east asian myself, the only caution is that a lot of Chinese families treat education as an arms race and a zero-sum game. And in certain ways, they are correct, there are only so many spots at top colleges/companies/positions of power. But I feel like this optimizes for some local minima, and one can get swept up in this whole competition for an unclear objective.
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Why would Japanese or Spanish be useless?
Oh I just don't believe in language transfer skills.
They all seem useless in terms of utility. Chinese maybe slightly less so because China is at least an ascending global superpower with billions of speakers.
Languages are ultimately useless, until they aren't. I think any of the three would be a good choice. Japanese would probably have a lot of the same benefits as Chinese, and it would open your kid up to working in neat liberal democratic Japan instead of crazy and bad and oppressive China (or Taiwan, I guess). There are a lot more admittedly insular Chinese speakers in America that could be spoken to, but Japan puts out a lot more cultural output, providing something you might actually want to use the language for.
I guess part of the consideration here would be that Spanish is relatively easy for an English speaker to learn, and Japanese and Chinese are not.
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I never thought I'd be someone who could converse in Japanese. I actually think at least in the US Spanish would have a great deal of utility in just dealing with people, but then the positives you list regarding the Chinese school may not be part of the Spanish-school package.
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