Us, them

Saturday, 26th September 2009

It's getting harder and harder to persuade people in this country to learn a foreign language. Lamenting our "deliberate descent into parochialism", the Economist's Charlemagne scans the schools stats:

One column reports on upper secondary students in EU countries who do not study foreign languages at all. This line in the table shows a line of tiny numbers: lots of zeroes, a couple of low percentages (eg, 3.9% of Spanish teenagers learn no foreign languages at school, a blip for Ireland (18.8% without language lessons) and then comes Britain, where more than half of all schoolchildren in upper secondary education (51.4%) learn no foreign languages at all.
This is, of course, the result of a deliberate government policy. In 2003, foreign languages became voluntary for pupils in England and Wales over 14... The British government would also doubtless argue that years of compulsory French lessons left pupils with few practical skills that could serve them on foreign streets. Fair enough. But Britain's unique (in the EU) refusal to study other people's languages still worries me. Learning a foreign language teaches you humility, empathy and respect for others. In Europe, it teaches you the ancient links that unite our squabbling continent.