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I'm not convinced it's America. A lot of countries seem to have working mass English education, with some notable exceptions being Japan, to a lesser extent China, and historically (though not anymore) France. At the same time, a lot of European countries force kids to learn a third language at school too, and at least in Germany I have not observed that going any better than second-language instruction in anglophone countries.
The best-fit model for this is something like "school does nothing, and kids will learn a language if and only if they need the pop culture of that language". The rare examples of masses failing to learn English are just the rare countries that produce enough good stuff of their own.
Yes, except that it's not the pop culture. That's just a bonus. The need is much more basal than that.
In the Netherlands for example, you will need English for any kind of higher education, even when the classes themselves aren't in English, the textbooks and articles will certainly be. You will need English for any office job. Advertisements, shop signs and other public texts are written in English more often than not. Computer software is usually in English. The Internet is, obviously, mostly in English.
There are two languages in common use, and you need to know them both; not knowing English is almost as bad as being illiterate. That means everyone is constantly getting a lot of practice, also outside of school. It means the benefits of having good English are very obvious, and the friction of not having it is bad enough that it'll motivate you to practice more if you need to.
In fact this may be a good way to describe it to an English speaker. It is quite like literacy. You don't acquire it naturally at home, you need to be taught it. But then, society presents you with a lot of text, even if you do not seek it out. Society expects you to be able to read information in that format, if you are to participate to any degree. You are always reading and often writing. Perhaps not capital-B Books all the time, like the literature teachers who complain that "kids don't read anymore" would like you to, but Internet forums, manuals, street signs, official forms, labels in the supermarket, text messages, someone's blog, your co-worker's E-mails, and so on. You get all that practice in, and as a result most people end up fairly decent readers.
Imagine if you had no use for reading, and you never actually used that skill outside of a specific "reading" class in school a couple of times a week. You would never get anywhere near decent at it, and you would forget it as soon as you're out of school. I have an actual real-world example of this exact thing happening, the Laotian literacy campaign of the 1980s.
You can, obviously, go into what is essentially a pre-modern village and teach the peasants to read, certainly to the point where the guy from the UN will be willing to count them as literate. But they're still pre-modern peasants whose lives haven't otherwise changed. They've never needed to read anything, they still don't, and they have no access to reading materials, save perhaps a few government pamphlets about literacy. They have no real reason to seek out any more reading material, nor any real way to do so. How could they even know what exists? So they just forget it again and when you go back to the village after a couple of years, they'll all be illiterate again. (I bet nowadays, all those villagers have cellphones and thus retain their literacy.)
And so it goes with language instruction at school. It's not that school does nothing at all: English is not my native language, I did have to be taught the basics. I remember not understanding the cartoons on the TV. You don't get there by osmosis unless it really is your native language. But once you do have that basis, it becomes self-reinforcing given all the societal exposure.
At one point I knew enough French to say 'where is the bathroom?', and I could recite the conjugation tables. There may well be French books worth reading, but I never got to that point. I could struggle my way through a newspaper article at one point. But why would I want to read a French newspaper that badly? I needed the high school diploma, not the French. My French is now just as nonexistent as the literacy of one of those Laotian villagers.
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I have to agree with your best-fit model. It's not schooling, but exposure and necessity. Primarily in regards to the internet, if my own experience generalizes as well as I think
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