RE: Moses McCormick's Video, Polyglot Project Question

Today Moses made a video about what he would do if he were in control of language learning in schools and how to get people interested in learning language. If you don't know him: http://www.youtube.com/user/laoshu505000 He's a really cool guy. His main point is that he would not make languages mandatory and he would use a different method of teaching, presumably his, to get students more motivated to learn the language. He also seems to think his idea would sell itself and students, through word of mouth, would persuade other people to take languages. I have mixed feelings about no longer making languages mandatory. The first language class I took was a mandatory one quarter French class in sixth grade. We also took one quarter Shop, Home Ec, and Art. The next year we would take Spanish for a quarter, and in 8th grade we could choose. If French would have been optional I probably would have still taken it since even back then I liked languages. I think that is really the time to have mandatory classes: in elementary and middle school, and in high school and university allow the students to choose whether they would want to take language classes or not. The lower grades, I think, are appropriate places for mandatory cultural and arts courses, so young students can understand who they are and what other cultures are like. I don't think this would work, though, since school funding might not allow this to happen in the lower grades, and the best an elementary teacher could muster might be to play some Spanish children's songs or go through a Spanish book for kids. One example of a mandatory course I didn't think I'd like but ended up liking were area studies and cultural diversity courses. We needed to take 4 credits from this category for a Bachelor's degree, and since they were 2 credits each, naturally, we took 2 of them. I took China and Japan. China was OK, the only reason I really didn't like it was because the textbook was long and dull and the professor had been in a skydiving accident and couldn't get up when he fell down, so a lot of classes were cancelled when he fell. I loved the Japan class. They were both basically history classes with a little culture thrown in. I agree with him that colleges and universities are basically businesses so they would require their students to take GenEd classes to make money. Well, maybe not exactly, since the universities and colleges may have to conform to certain requirements from the state or accreditation agency. If you don't want to take GenEd classes, go for an Associate's degree. Anyway, I wrote a comment on Moses's video. I basically said that I started taking Spanish at my university as an elective in summer school since I needed an elective and that appealed to me the most among my choices. I started to study Spanish about the time I registered for classes, which would have been late February or early March, and have been studying ever since. I think I may have been the only one in the 2 classes who was taking it as an elective and not just as a GenEd class, which is what the Arts & Sciences students have to do. I think I may have gotten some strange looks because I said I like languages and that was the only reason I was taking the class. During the spring semester before summer school the university offered free Saturday classes in Arabic, Mandarin, Spanish, and French. I took Mandarin, and stopped going about halfway through. That is the sort of thing I would like to see more of, schools offering these programs - to everyone connected with the university in some way, such as the children of students, not just students - to try to get people interested in languages.