| I took CS among others in high school but didn’t have to sacrifice foreign language for it. It uses different parts of your brain. Honestly, my exposure to foreign languages has helped me at various points building tech where I may have made a wholly English centric view about encodings, data models, etc. The other thing about studying foreign language is that it encourages foreign travel and teaches us about other cultures which only stand to make us more well rounded students and people. Maybe my opinion is the minority, but I feel so positive about the benefits of language study that we try to get our kids in the 1/2 day language immersion program at their elementary each year. Apparently in my area enough people feel the same as we’ve lost out on the lottery the last two years :( It’s easy to ignore various humanities/social studies when we are interested in learning about such different things like CS and robotics. At university my engineering classes were in fancy new buildings but a lot of my general studies classes were in old uncomfortable buildings that would always be too hot or too cold- just adding to the misery of studying something I had no interest in. I’m still glad for every one of those boring classes I took. I wouldn’t have known how much I absolutely loved studying Greek/Roman mythology, basic philosophy, and early North American native archeology. |