Even the most basic of year 9 language education if it's done right opens up the student to accepting that there are such things as different ways of looking at the world and communicating in it.

You need to have been confronted with the problem of adjusting to a different culture and not being able to make yourself understood and then getting the huge pay-off of in fact getting the thing you wanted or making the point you had in another tongue, regardless of how many hands and feet you used. If you want to communicate you need to be able to speak and you have to have experienced the joys and difficulties of learning another language. Language is seen as a tool by these students to allow them to be active in a global environment rather than solely an academic pursuit and there are millions of them pouring out of the schools and universities of the rest of the world and looking for opportunities. You had students who not only spoke their mother tongue or tongues(!) but varying degrees of German and very often English too. I saw it in Thailand first-hand at the Asia-Pacific German Olympics. Monolingual English speakers run a huge risk. The use of Chinese grew by 1,277% in a decade since 2000! The share of French, German, Spanish and Chinese has increased and the share of English has shrunk to 30% in the past two decades. However, this pattern is changing faster than expected. The first language used on the internet was English and by 1990s it made up 90% of the content. The world is morphing fast and far from the digital revolution singularising language into an English only world, the more digital our world becomes, the more fractured our world becomes and the less likely it is for a single language to control everything. The following article is an indicator of what I consider the important place for languages in education in New Zealand.

Monolingual english speakers