> Does making it substitute for foreign language education, and thus effectively, relative to the status quo, discouraging foreign language education make any s

> Does making it substitute for foreign language education, and thus effectively, relative to the status quo, discouraging foreign language education make any sense as a way to do that? No, not at all. Of the two, programming education is probably the more useful. With a small amount of programming education, you can automate simple tasks. I would expect that taking 2 years of a programming class would leave you at least able to use existing libraries to perform basic tasks. You know what I can do with my 2 years of high school Spanish and a year of college Spanish? Nothing. I never had a reason to use it, so it languished. Even when the knowledge was fresh, my vocabulary and general comprehension were too poor to have anything other than scripted conversations. I can order food in Spanish, but God forbid they respond with anything other than "si" because it's going to go right over my head. I'm not alone in that. Every single one of my friends took a second language in high school, and only 2 of them can actually converse and read their other language. And both of them learned at home from their parents, not in high school. Being bilingual would be great for students, but that's not what we're getting out of second languages in high school. We're getting people that know how to ask where the library is, and can't understand the response. It's a waste of time. We either need to double down and start the language learning process much earlier and invest more time in making students fluent, or admit that the classes are mostly a novelty and allow other more useful things to take their place.