There are some secondary benefits from learning a second language [1]. But learning Spanish outside of a few areas in the US brings little direct benefit. There just aren't enough Spanish speakers who don't also speak English in the vast majority of the US.

Furthermore, Immigration from Mexico is falling off, and the percent of Hispanic households who speak English at home is rapidly rising. This means that any direct benefit to learning Spanish will diminish over time.

>If anything, they'd be able to use spanish language programming to help them learn. Which is ironically the same sorts of things that younger kids from other countries learning english have to learn from.

Not even remotely comparable. The amount of material available only in English dwarfs the material available only in Spanish.

To sum up, sure kids in American can learn Spanish, and many do. But there are real tangible and financial benefits to learning English as a second language that dwarf any of the benefits American kids get from learning Spanish. Once you recognize that, it makes perfect sense that Americans are more likely to be monolingual.

[1] Studies show, there are cognitive benefits to bilingualism, but they also show there are benefits to monolingualism. Usually you'll find more benefits to bilingualism over all, but larger single-language vocabulary and faster retrieval time are definitely advantageous. Studies also don't show that the cognitive benefits of learning a second language outweigh the cognitive opportunity costs of studying something else instead.

Additionally, the majority of these cognitive benefits are recorded in children and adults who spent a fair amount of time speaking in both languages. It's unlikely that learning a language in school and then forgetting it later will have the same beneficial effects.

I'm originally from Indiana, and lived there until 3 years ago, upon which I moved to Norway. I lived in small to medium sized towns, and would have found it to be a benefit for many jobs, especially low-paying or lower-management jobs. I imagine it is the same for much of the midwest, the south, and the southwest. You are correct on the immigration from mexico, however, and it may bring dimishing returns as time goes on.

> The amount of material available only in English dwarfs the material available only in spanish. You don't need the same amount of material, nor do you need only available in spanish. You just have to find the material. Harry Potter is generally a good series to read when learning a foreign language because it is available in so many, for example. Outside of English, however, spanish language television and reading material is one of the easier to obtain in the US. Norwegian, for example, is a little trickier to find as it isn't nearly as widespread.

English is one of the 'special' languages, and a lot of languages don't compare - it is used as a unifying language in a lot of professions. It really, really helps me here in Norway, especially since there is a high fluency rate here (Console games and adult movies generally aren't translated, for example). I'm pretty lucky that English is my primary language.

Sidenote: I generally think the advantages to bilingualism are greater. Especially if they teach people a different way of looking at the world, which is somewhat the main benefit of a second language. At that point, however, it doesn't matter which language one learns. Klingon would probably work just as well for such cognitive effects. This sort of thing really shouldn't go away, even if the language was forgotten.

I think you may be overestimating the benefit. When I worked as a retail supervisor in college, we paid $0.25 more if you spoke one of a few different languages. It never really made much difference when hiring. I also had many Spanish speaking friends in lower paying jobs and apart from 1 who worked as a hospital translator there wasn't much financial benefit.

If you take the amount of time that it takes to become proficient (and keep proficiency), you'd be much better off spending that time on something more lucrative. From a purely financial perspective, after factoring in opportunity costs, I think that learning Spanish probably has a negative ROI.

>This sort of thing really shouldn't go away, even if the language was forgotten.

We don't really know that though. We need more evidence before we base start taking action here. It could be that learning the violin would have more benefit. Learning a new language is romantic, we can't let that romanticism impact policy decisions.

And my guess is that to get most of the benefits of bilingualism, you have to get to the point where you spend time thinking in both languages. I don't think classroom instruction is ever going to get you to that level.

That's very true today. It wasn't true just 20 and 30 years ago. The Spanish speaking population in the US has skyrocketed in that time. In 1980 for example, the US was about 82% white and almost exclusively English speaking. That's a very rapid cultural change, shifting from a few percent Spanish speaking to 1/4 in just three decades. I'd suggest that over the next 20 years it will be very beneficial for children to be taught Spanish (and they likely will be), however the near-past value of it was not remotely as high as it is now and will become. The point being, it takes time for a nation to adjust to such a rapid change, you're not going to get hundreds of millions of people - across very diverse (in every sense) education zones - to shift to all knowing Spanish in 10 or 15 years.

Where are you getting that? The current percent of native Spanish speakers in the US is only about 13%, and the majority of them also speak English.

Immigration from Mexico has dropped off and the number of Americans of Hispanic descent who speak only English at home is rapidly increasing.

Virtually all immigrant children learn English in school, so it's very likely that the benefits of learning Spanish will decrease over time not increase. Historically the 3rd generation of US immigrants speak only English, and the current trends suggest that will happen with Hispanic immigrants as well.

Mostly due to the recent US economic downturn and the poor distribution of the returns of the subsequent aggregate expansion beyond the upper classes. That's probably not a durable trend unless the US economy continues to be miserable for all but the elites.

Mexico is only about 1/3 the size of the US and surveys indicate only 1/3 of Mexican adults have any desire to come to the US at all.

Of those people, only half indicated willingness to come illegally and given that fact that they haven't done it yet, you can assume most of them won't. (This matters because there are limits on the number of legal immigrants)

Assuming all Mexicans who are willing to actually make the journey here make it, and adding in immigrants from other Spanish speaking countries, it's still not enough to overcome the historical trend towards language assimilation.