Why Is English Important?

In all of my waiting (see the post below), I've been trying to broaded the news I read (online). In one of my attempts to get caught up on news in Korea, I found an interesting article about the need for English in South Korea.

To sum up the article (for those of you who are too lazy to click on the link and read it):

- many Koreans are not as fluent as they would like to be in English (as evidenced by many Koreans who work abroad and work with foreigners)

- some are worried about a focus on English (which takes away from the rest of the curriculum and could potentially lead to the eventual demise of the Korean language)

- foreign languages (more than English, though it is certainly one of the more useful ones) are helpful in a world in which barriers to communiction and trade are frequently being broken down.

For my part, I look at my teaching job not as colonialism (which I'm sure is what some people see it as), but as helping the Koreans gain a valuable tool. If Koreans can speak English and Korean, they have tools to deal with more people. If they learn other languages (French, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic), they are even more equipped than the monoliguists who need phrasebooks to have the most trivial of conversations.

The irony is, of course, that while the west supports this teaching of English, we do not teach our children other languages to the degree that the Koreans do (by mass hiring native speakers of a language to teach it). In a world that is largely anglocentric we have not had to do this. One day we may have to learn other languages (my guess would be Mandarin) to communicate with the rest of the world.

Why not start now?