by Boris Johnson » Mon Sep 10, 2012 10:00 am
The whole 'everyone knows a bit of French and should' thing is largely a relic of when a lot of the international institutions were being set up in the late 19th early 20th and then, it made sense to have French and English as the two diplomatic languages.
Its stupid now though, we should be teaching our kids Mandarin and Spanish as others have noted (there are also a few other contenders). Because as fun as it is to go to France and certain parts of north, west and central Africa. Its hardly got the utility that the notion of teaching kids a foreign language really requires.
Frankly there's more educational value in teaching kids Latin than French.