I've just read a news that it's about to be approved a law that will make Spanish classes obligatory in every brazilian school. About time!
The funny thing is, i was actually talking about this very subject just last week with my girlfriend. I was telling her i feel like i need to learn spanish (haven't started taking classes yet), and how odd it is that we don't learn spanish at school. I mean, just look around. We're completely surrounded by spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, i feel ashamed i don't know spanish.
There's also another reason why i believe we should have spanish classes at school. And that is: english classes simply don't work at our schools, IMHO. If you wanna learn english, you better take private classes, at english courses. At school you'll just learn how to say "hello", "good morning", which ain't gonna be useful for nobody, really.
But why doesn't it work? I think it's mainly for 3 reasons:
- English is way too different from our native-language (portuguese), and that itself is a huge barrier for many students;
- Our school classes are too crowded, which makes it a mess for teaching english (too many uninterested students won't let the interested ones learn anything), which gets even worse because of the 1st point;
- Sometimes the teacher isn't good enough (specially at public schools).
I don't know about point 3, but i definitely think points 1 and 2 would be a lot different were it spanish classes instead of english ones.
Now, i don't mean to say we shouldn't learn english; but i'd rather have our students speaking well portuguese and spanish, than speaking portuguese and barely speaking english.