The area and time I grew up in had zero non-English classes until high school! Literally just skipping the most beneficial periods of language learning. It was only required that we take 1 year of a foreign language to graduate, and that’s not really enough time to be proficient (or it wasn’t the way we were taught, anyway).

I’ve been casually learning Spanish for the past few years, and doing it on your own as an adult without paying for courses is hard, especially if your native language is in a different language family. I can definitely understand why people who emerge from the school system monolingual just stay that way.