My son starts Middle School in September. We just got a flyer from the school board asking him to choose a foreign language class. The choices are: French, Italian, Spanish.

My advice to him (which of course he will ignore) is just to be hard-headed about it & pick the language most likely to give him an “edge” in future employment.

That rules out Spanish, since the USA is choc-a-bloc with Spanish-speakers, so the market value of this skill must be low.

As an opera fan, I’m tempted to recommend Italian. However, Danny has so far shown no interest in opera (to put it mildly–he runs from the room when I put opera on the hi-fi). Furthermore, if Mark Steyn is right, by the time Danny graduates from college, there will be no Italians left anyway.

There might not be any French people left either, but there will be about twenty billion Francophone Africans, along with Quebeckers, Lebanese, and Southeast Asians, so French might still be worth something, if only for a job at the UN. I recommended French.

The boy will, of course, take up whichever language he believes to be most “cool.”