I'll be more bold than panglott... we can't "give up" teaching modern foreign languages, because we already don't teach modern foreign languages.

I took four years of high school French, and got decent grades. I recently started reviewing and learning more through flashcards in Anki. On the one hand, the fours years of "study" put enough French in my head that I'm making progress this way... on the other hand, as I continue making what is frankly a great deal more progress with the spaced-repitition than I ever made in school I still can't help but notice I still can not fluently read much of anything, let alone speak or hear it.

Now, as it is common on the Internet to confuse saying something is true with advocating for that fact, let me say that A: I still think learning a language is a good idea, I just don't think what we have now can actually be called "learning a language" and B: if we were ever allowed to change The Holy Curriculum [1], there's probably more effective ways to teach a foreign language. I can't help but notice that my Anki-based studies are wildly more effective than what I tried to do in school. (They're also still inadequate on their own so far. No contradiction there... my schooling was even more inadequate, you see.) Four years of a properly-researched and developed language program, with proper software support, might have produced someone at least capable of using the language at the end.

[1]: A phrase I am settling in on to indicate my contempt for the idea that we need to deeply reform education, but we must do so under the constraint that nobody is ever allowed to remove, add, reorder, or change anything we do, ever.

Language study is tough in high school. A better case can be made for teaching languages as early as possible (pre-K, K-6). My nephew's Catholic school is teaching him Spanish[1] in pre-K and will continue until 8th grade. I took Dakota (not to be confused with Lakota) in high school. I couldn't really speak it then or now[2], but it did stick with me[3], but I see the children who learned it in K-6 did much better.

1) My parents and I recently took my 5 year old nephew with us on vacation to DC. He tends to sing at that age. We were in an elevator and he started in on a song and a couple from Spain started asking me questions about it. I really could only say he was being taught Spanish at his school.

2) I just cannot do a guttural with my voice. It sounds like I'm coughing. I have such a low voice anyway that it sounds wrong all the way around. At least I learned from a male instructor, that's a bit important as the sexes speak differently in Dakota. My old boss, a female, learned to speak from her uncles and her aunts thought she "spoke like a man".

3) I still do server names in Dakota. wanca is my #1 server.

Pretty awesome, that you learned some Dakota! At least it gives you something to work with, if you wanted to expose your kids/nephew to it. Bilingualism from childhood is a really powerful and amazing gift to a child, and really it doesn't matter what the languages are: a heritage language is as good as a major national language.

The dual-language immersion programs are really awesome; I've seen kids from monolingual English families learn to do all their math work in Spanish by the end of kindergarten. Teaching kids language in that way is so much more effective, I hope those programs only become more popular.

The key premise is that one year of mandatory classroom teaching isn't actually going to get someone speaking proficiently, unless perhaps it's something like Esperanto.

They won't be speaking Latin either, but at least some written knowledge of Latin will be useful. The basic paradigm of classroom language education started when Latin was commonly taught... and since it focused on teaching passive, literary use of the language (rather than active, oral use), that was entirely appropriate.

But superficial, passive, literary understanding of modern national languages doesn't help anyone much more than it would of Latin.

Sure, but the point is that a superficial literary understanding of Spanish is a stepping stone towards plonking yourself in a Spanish-speaking country and realising just how much Spanish you don't know, not to mention a substantial step towards being able to read a vast and growing quantity of Spanish-only written material.

A superficial literary understanding of Latin gives you middle class bragging rights and a substantial step towards being able to parse the original text of a literature which has been exhaustively translated into English, complete with notes on shades of meaning. (And an even more limited grasp of some of the fundamentals of Spanish, I suppose) And since the source material is all ancient texts, you can't even pep the teaching up with some relevant and modern material or motivate the students by the prospect they can use it to backpack in Peru or do language exchange in Madrid.

I'm not persuaded that the inadequacy of languages teaching is an argument for the same time to be devoted to devoted to something which is even further removed from being useful and the teacher is even less likely to be adequately equipped to teach.

These days we have good models for how to teach bilingualism to kids: dual-language immersion schools, in which both languages are used extensively in coursework. The problem is that this labor-intensive model will be impractical outside metropolitan areas with school choice, or communities with a strong heritage language community.

Latin may not be a living language, but it remains very widely used in scientific terminology, law, religion, and elsewhere. Like the prestigious national languages, it is a mark of erudition and social status; the demonstration of which is itself a purpose of education.