If foreign language classes in school were a product sold in the market, they would have gone out of business decades ago.

Economist Bryan Caplan once did the math: the average American spends two years studying a foreign language in high school. That’s hundreds of hours of class time, homework, tests, and stress. What’s the result? According to the General Social Survey, fewer than 1 in 100 students ever reach fluency from all that effort. That’s a 99.3% failure rate.

No serious consumer would accept those odds in any other context. Imagine a gym that promised to get you in shape, but only 0.7% of its members ever saw results. Imagine a driving school where only 1 in 100 students ever got their license. People would demand refunds, leave angry reviews, and the business would collapse overnight.

And yet, traditional school-based language education keeps chugging along.

Why It Doesn’t Work

The core problem isn’t lack of effort. Students spend years grinding through vocab lists, verb charts, and exams. Teachers work hard. Parents encourage their kids. But the method itself is broken.

• It treats language like an academic subject. Memorization, tests, and grammar drills dominate, even though conversation in real life runs on unconscious flow, not conscious recall.
• It emphasizes output too early. Students are forced to “practice speaking” long before they’ve absorbed enough input to sound natural, which only reinforces clumsy patterns.
• It lacks massive exposure. Two or three classes a week simply can’t compete with the thousands of hours of listening and reading that true acquisition requires.

It’s not that students are lazy or untalented. It’s that the system is designed in a way that almost guarantees failure.

If Schools Were Businesses…

In a market, products live or die by results. But because language education is bundled into general schooling, there’s no feedback loop. You can’t “unsubscribe” from French class. You can’t demand your time back after years of effort. Everyone shrugs and moves on, chalking it up to a personal failing: “I’m just bad at languages.”

But that’s not true. Human beings are universally good at acquiring languages. Every child masters their native tongue. Millions of adults around the world learn second and third languages naturally when their environment makes it necessary. The failure isn’t in people. It’s in the method.

The Alternative That Works

When you copy what actually works — massive listening, lots of reading, and delaying speaking until you’ve built a foundation — the results are completely different. This is how children learn, how successful adult polyglots learn, and how our learners succeed every day.

The real tragedy is that most people walk away from school convinced they can’t learn a language, when the truth is they never got the chance to do it in a way that works.

The Takeaway

Traditional school-based language instruction has a track record that would bankrupt any company in the world: 99.3% failure. If fluency is the goal, then it’s time to stop repeating what doesn’t work and start copying the one method that has never failed: the way humans naturally acquire language.