Some people estimate that children and teenagers should learn disappearing languages and this can be an efficient method of strengthening it. Personally, I disagree with this statement, because children must have more freedom in their lives.
Firstly, we need to discover how no alternative solutions can reflect on children’s development. If we put young people who want to be free from the system and control in the conditions where they should learn something without any options, we can get an inefficient result. For instance, when I was a scholar my classmates often skipped some classes or didn’t listen carefully because they didn’t like the subject. As a result, major of my classmates failed the Unified State Exam and forgot all the information from the school.
Secondly, some cultural norms wouldn’t be able to stand without special external conditions. Language is a tool that people use in their daily life, so if we don’t have any situation when young people speak in a lesser-known language it will disappear anyway. For example, Russian students don’t know English very well although it is an obligatory condition for learning English at school. The main reason is related to lack of daily communication in English and not enough cultural and social conditions such as translated books in the public domain and encouragement to use a foreign language.
In conclusion, I think we can’t force young people to learn lesser-known languages or anything. Maybe we should think about creating cultural conditions and upgrading the cultural importance of language, if we want to get better results.