This article discusses various facets of language education. The first section provides a brief historical sketch of second and foreign language education. The second section discusses directions in the internationalization of education in general, and section 3 focuses on recent trends in alternatives to traditional national school systems and briefly discusses some of the most prominent ways of coping with the growing internationalization of modern life (i.e., international schools, language immersion, and content-based language teaching). Section 4 highlights developments in Finland concerning the integration of language and content instruction. (Contains 2 references.) (CK)