Cancelling English as a main subject might end up hurting normal families in the end.
But less effort in the short term inevitably carries a cost long term: if English stops being a main subject, it won’t disappear, it’ll just become more and more “expensive”, just like piano.
Right now, if you’re a normal family that doesn’t have money for tutoring classes, your kid can still rely on school education and hard work to slowly raise their grades, get through the Gaokao, pass CET 4 and 6 in college, and even if they’re not totally fluent, they’ve at least grasped the basics.
If they don’t work in a profession that uses English, they can leave it by the wayside (just like how most work doesn’t have much to do with physics or chemistry or biology either, should we stop teaching those too with this logic?). If they want to travel overseas or keep studying, then at least school education formed a steady foundation for them.
Importantly: language takes time. If schools don’t teach it and families don’t support it, then how hard it is for an adult to start from zero?
Of course, we do need reforms in English education.
But the problem should be “how do we teach this” and not “should we teach it at all?”
What we really should be cancelling is pointless English involution, not the opportunity for normal kids to interact with English at all.
