It's a common question: why am I not fluent in Spanish, French or Japanese ever having suffered through two to four years of it during high school? As you probably know from your own experience and that of your friends, high school language education helpful for ordering in restaurants, useful for getting into a good college, and perhaps makes a vacation seem slightly more authentic, but very rarely leads to a truly fluent level of speaking, writing and comprehension.
There are a few reasons for this. First, the human brain is a language learning machine during its younger years and becomes less receptive to languages starting at puberty. Second, we were never really meant to learn a language in a class room like something such as history or calculus. Instead, we all learned our first language through a natural process of immersion: Before we started speaking, we had exposure to thousands of hours of conversation around us.
When beginning to speak, we were strongly encouraged and not punished for small errors. Learning your first language wasn't something that you did for 50 minutes four times per week with some boring homework thrown in. Instead, it was our lifeline to the people, objects and culture around us. Compared to this organic experience, learning a language from a book is dramatically different. Even if language classes cannot reproduce the immersion that we all had growing up, it's still starting too late: language classes that began in elementary school or even before would be dramatically more effective.
Jim Tonkins writes about glass bathroom sinks [http://bathroomsinksandvanities.net/glass-bathroom-sinks/] and other bathroom sinks and vanities [http://bathroomsinksandvanities.net/].