You seem to be implying that if you hadn’t wanted to ensure that your daughters are bi-lingual, you wouldn’t have had to pay for au pairs, a nanny, or private school, that they wouldn’t be going to college, and that you wouldn’t have taken family trips to Germany. That’s pretty extreme, doing ALL of that to ensure that they speak German fluently, but to each his own.

That said, even if you COULD say that every penny of that (plus books, dvd’s, etc…) went straight towards making sure that your daughters speak German fluently, are you implying that our country should make the switch to a multi-language curriculum for EVERY child, simply to save you some money? How many languages should this curriculum include? Should we make street signs and government documents in all of those languages, too?

Are you aware that we spend billions of dollars every year for the multi-lingual stuff we’re doing already? It’s a good thing our government has all that extra money lying around that isn’t needed elsewhere…. But you’re right, I’m sure they should spend more to save you some money….

My Japanese wife and I have raised two pre-teens at native grade-level Japanese fluency with an investment of roughly $15000 total–mostly for plane tickets and whatnot to bring the family to Japan when I was there for work, plus a home-based curriculum and subscription to a service that streams Japanese TV over the internet. And that’s in a place (rural Appalachia) with no one else to talk to in Japanese.

The difference is that we didn’t use nannies or child care, and we homeschool. Their socializing and learning takes place in a Japanese-dominant environment–in the context of our daily lives, not something we pay someone else to do for us. Families like us aren’t common, but there are enough successful examples that discussions of the “monolingual public education system” need to be aware of the alternative we offer.

@Christof: I really enjoyed this article, particularly the tallying of the cost of fighting the monolingual tide. My own research deals with multilingual resistance to the monolingual thesis and although I can intellectually follow the thought process that casts multilingualism as somehow undesirable, it still baffles me that anybody thinks deliberate monolingualism is a good idea.

@khan – Thank you for sharing your comment and data — very interesting and, if the ultimate goal is English monolingualism for elites in Pakistan (at least some of them), troubling as well.

Thanks for enlightening post written with specificity. I would like to share with you something on assimilative and subtractive language ideology emerging in my data. It may be a surprise for some of our readers that in Pakistan where English is proficiently used barely 2% of the population has private institutions whose vision and mission is to provide English assimilation environment within the school. One of my research participant said, ‘it is suicidal not to speak English all the time”. This is not an idiosyncratic view but is embedded in larger socio-economic inequalities among different sections of the population. The state schools only claim to provide English education and attended by poorest of the society. The elite send their children to become truly subtractive bilinguals, the best example from my data is the response of a mother who took such a great pride in saying that, ‘ oh my son does not know a word of Punjabi’ The mother and the father were the native speaker of Punjabi language.
Best wishes,
Khan