I did not attend a high school, because I went to school in Germany. But in Gymnasium, a rough equivalent to the American high school, we had two compulsory foreign languages. The first one was English, the second one was chosen by you. It was a rare exception that we focused on learning vocabulary. In my first ever English lesson, the teacher entered the room and said "Good morning, my name is Mr. Fleischer." in English. We were shocked, since neither of us did understand a single word. For the first month I wasn't even sure he could speak German at all. Until my graduation, everything, even administrative stuff, jokes, or complaints about homework had to be said in English in English class. It was similar in French class. That is far from "just memorizing lists of data that they forget a month later". Perhaps, the quality of teaching should be improved.
Btw, one of my English teachers, taught us also in Chemistry and did that in English for a year. That was 25 years ago.
I did learn to read, write, listen, and speak three foreign languages in high school. Beyond learning vocabulary, there was not much memorizing going on. I still use two of these foreign languages regularly!
I would rather we fix foreign language education rather than just cut it. Besides, why not teach parts of these "life lessons" during foreign language class? Might be interesting to compare home economics in different cultures.
I also took 3 compulsory foreign language classes and retained maybe 30 words after the exams. I hated it and treated it as a memorization problem. It was a complete waste of my time due to a lack of interest. I don't think you could have fixed it for someone like me. The root problem was my disinterest in learning another language which I don't think is going to change with a different pedagogy. I'm just simply not interested in the prospect of learning that content, and trying to get that content into my brain was a matter of great subjective displeasure.
That's why it should be opt-in. The people that are capable of getting value from it (you) join in and the people guaranteed to get no value due to a lack of interest (me) can do something else.
The same thing shouldn't apply to critical/foundational classes like basic math. But foreign languages aren't that.
I'd say it shows the weakness of the teaching system, if you can pass by just memorizing. I guess standardized tests are to be blamed for that. In a decent foreign language class, treating it as a memorization excercize should let you fail. And in my experience it did.
