Whoa! I only got halfway through the prior messages in this thread when I couldn't take it anymore.
I am a professional English teacher and have spent most of three decades teaching abroad.
First off, the OP, Mr. Painter suggests 'mandatory' English. Now,'impossible' is not a word I like to use, but it's the correct one in this case. I should also make an allusion here to herding cats, I guess.
Mr. Painter, I have been teaching for thirty yeas, and I must confess to you that I am a fraud because
you can't teach anyone anything! They must be willing to learn. A teacher presents the material. A good teacher may inspire the students to learn, but it is ultimately the student who teaches him or her self.
Chairman Mao, whose mug is on every one of my yuan bills here in Gansu, China, famously said, "Power comes from the barrel of a gun". Well, who am I to disagree with the great one? But I can tell you all this: if you made English, or any other tongue,
mandatory, and tried to teach it at gunpoint, you'd end up shooting no one but
yourself!
You cannot force people to learn. BTW, a valuable lesson is here presented to those of you who insist on brow beating and coming off as all high and mighty (in the name of science) in your 'corrections' to other posters. You are teaching them nothing! When you adopt such an attitude, I guarantee you that it is such a turn off that your audience will quite deliberately
not agree with you. Much of the arguing and bickering we see here on this forum and ones similar are due to this very reason. If you have something to say, say it in a kindly, respectful and lighthearted way and you will be sure to win support for your argument. Mary Poppins was right. A spoonful of sugar really does make the medicine go down.
Then there is the fact that many people, many intelligent people even, just aren't any good at learning a second language. As the old Berlitz series said in the intro,"anyone who isn't a moron speaks at least one language". The Little Professor's point was that it shouldn't be that difficult to learn a second one because we all have an innate ability for language. True enough, but for some individuals it is such slow going that their instructors really will want to borrow that powerful gun of the great chairman's.
So how to make mandatory English succeed? Cash incentives? Ha! Good luck with that! Who would be in charge? What worldwide organization has that kind of administrative power? As I pointed out in a thread earlier today the UN and all of its individual and 'powerful' members have done virtually nothing consequential to slow climate change. An important issue like that on which the planet's survival depends, and they've known it for decades now, and they talk and propose things, but nothing has actually been done to any effect. Are
they going to make English mandatory?
Secondly, I once asked a mixed class of mostly Indonesian and Korean high school students what the best language was. They put on their teenage drone of boredom and subtle rebellion and replied, "English..." thinking that was the answer I wanted to hear. "No!" I told them. "Every language is just as good as every other. There is no 'best' language." I certainly woke them from their academic slumbers. I explained that there is no "Me Tarzan, you Jane" language. I don't want to slur anyone, but even a tribesman in the jungles of Papua New Guinea who speaks a language only he and 26 of his clansmen know, speaks a language just as rich as English, Greek or Mandarin (completely arbitrary examples). Granted they may not have an exact word or term yet for
antidisestablishmentarianism or
particle acceleration but their language could certainly convey the concept if it were needed.
So why should English be the one world language?
It is certainly true that it would be convenient if we all spoke one language, but so much would be lost. Having traveled the world and done my best to learn a few languages (Alas, I am one of the slowpokes though and a new language comes only with great effort to me) I understand the truth of the maxim that you cannot separate language from culture. While we all are human beings and think in much the same way, there are definitely divergent points of view that have everything to do with the language we are thinking in and speaking.
For instance the English system of tenses reflect how important time and chronology are to our way of thinking. In other languages the emphasis in a conversation may be on
what - while with English speakers the
what is often clear enough so we concern ourselves with the
when. Should the
what not be clear, why then we can shift emphasis until it is, and get back to what really culturally and linguistically interests us - the
when.
Thirdly, if we were so foolish as to try to force everyone to learn the same language, English is a very poor choice indeed. Yes, it is the most widely spoken language around the world and dominates, the Internet, the post and all other mass media (with the exception of Koranic recitals), but it is also just about the most idiomatic language there has ever been.
An idiom, as I define it to my students, is a group of words whose overall meaning in different than the usual meaning of the individual words. For example:
money talks. Even the lowest level English student will know these two basic and essential words after a few lessons, but
money talks!? Ben Franklin on those much coveted greenbacks actually speaks? No wonder everyone wants US dollars! But
no; that's not what
money talks means.
English speakers say, "Birds of a feather..." and don't even have to say the second half of the expression because other English speakers know it, and get the meaning. A student of English, even a very advanced one is usually flummoxed by this common idiom. While most languages have idiomatic expressions, English has many more, they are used everyday by everybody from New Zealand to Point Barrow and everywhere in between and the language is notorious because of them.
Then there is the ridiculous standards of spelling. Let's not go there! Suffice to reiterate that English would be a very poor choice for a world language.
Finally, I'd like to say something about my Chinese hosts and good friends. They possess an uncommon amount of common sense, and although this is their century and they will soon rule the world (again) they understand it would be ridiculous to try to get the world to speak Mandarin. Whether they or any on else likes it or not, English as
the world language is a done deal. Two great and belligerent military-commercial empires one on the heels of another were English-speaking nations and there is really no point in trying to undo that.
The best plan, and it's not even a plan because it is what is bound to occur in any case, is for English with all its vagaries to carry on as the international language, while people go on speaking their mother tongues. There is much beauty, artistry and poetry in these languages. More than any one really knows. That's sure. There is absolutely no good reason to forgo the other 9,000 languages in the world. Many of them are disappearing fast enough as it is. Those who want to pursue scientific, academic or international commercial interest or just 'friend' foreign people on Facebook can learn English. They will do it because it
interests them, and speaking as a dull purveyor of photocopied material and bloodless audio dialogs, this is the only way -
the absolute only way- that anyone has ever learned, has ever achieved fluency in another language. One world is enough for all of us, one language, however, is not.