Language education in England....what a joke.

Hey people :)
I thought I would post this now, because I mentioned it in the last post, and it's something that gets me heated up whenever I think about it (I know, I'm sad.)

Education in England/the UK in general....not that bad, no? It's certainly not the worst. I'm not going into debates about the private/public sector. I'm pretty sure my feelings regarding the language education is the same no matter whether or not you paid a lot of money to be educated.

As I mentioned before, I have been learning spanish for a very long time. About 9 years to be exact. I started in Year 7, and have carried it on through college, and into university. Now, for that space of time, you would think that I would be somewhere near fluent. But the fact is I'm not. And that may be partly my fault, in that I haven't always been as pro-active with it as I could have been.

But the main thing I have a problem with is this- the first 5 years, I learnt barely anything. When I left with a GCSE in Spanish, I could barely conjugate a verb. I had no idea how to say, "I go" let alone "I went" or "I had gone." These to me, are the basic stepping stones to learn a language. If you can't use different tenses, how are you meant to express anything beyond "I want a beer"? (which is something that I've been told many times by people is the only thing they remember from their GCSE years). How sad. It wasn't until I got to college was I taught how to do any kind of conjugation. Even though I was 16 at the time, this made me mad.

Now, being here, with many different people from various countries also on a Erasmus year, if I complain to them, they say "Well, you speak English, everyone should speak English, so why should you worry about learning another language?" This shocked me. I thought it was just the English that had the mentality of, "We speak the most useful/the best/the most wanted language in the world, so why should we bother?" But apparently not. There have been a couple of people here who have come up to me and said, "OMG you speak English! I HAVE to speak English with you! I came here to improve my English!" Wait.....what? You come to Spain to improve your English? I kid you not. These people have no interest whatsoever in speaking Spanish.

I'm not trying to be rude but.....I already know English. I am perfectly happy in my English abilities. I mean, I've been learning it for 20 years now. I think I am kind of fluent. I for one came here to speak Spanish. Don't get me wrong, at times my brain can't deal with Spanish, and I have to use English, or if I'm talking to familiy or friends who don't speak Spanish, then I use English. But to choose to speak English here over Spanish, to me it seems a little "tonto" (stupid).

But I've gone WAY off topic. My bug-bear is the English system. I know people here who have been learning Spanish for barely a couple of years, and yet they know a lot more than I did after two years. Most of them already know English as well as their mother-tongue. How do they do this? I put it down to their education. And not just that, but their attitude. They are so much more open to learning languages. And I think that's where we're going wrong.

To counter this argument, of course, there are people in every country that just aren't very good at languages. I for one don't think I'd be able to speak more than two. And there are people everywhere that only want their mother-tongue. But it just appears to me that there is a disproportionate amount of people in England that feel this way. Maybe it's a United Kingdom mentality, maybe it also extends to the States, I'm not sure. I can only speak from my experience.

And this is why I do NOT want to teach languages in England, even though people tell me it's a viable career for me. No thank you!

:D