“I Don’t Want American Kids”: The Real Reason Parents Are Suddenly Choosing Language Immersion Schools
29th August 2022
As kids headed back to school this week, I noticed a peculiar trend: friends and acquaintances of mine have started sending their kids to Japanese, French, and Spanish immersion schools—that is, parents who do not speak those languages. I know a lovely family of American-born parents who is sending its children to mainland China to be educated, and another who selected a school offering a “Classical education,” where, in her words, “the kids are learning Latin and Greek by third grade.” (Mom never studied either language.)
Over the last two decades, matriculation at dual-language curricula in both public and private schools has skyrocketed. In 2000, there were roughly 260 dual-language programs in the U.S. By 2011, Harvard Graduate School of education estimated the number at 2,000.
The American Councils Research Center estimates that in 2010, there were about 1,000 dual-language programs in public-schools in the U.S. A decade later, there were more than three times that many. American parents are signing up their kids for instruction in languages they can’t speak and immersion in cultures to which they have no native connection.