Foreign Language Redux

Sherman Dorn takes me to task for generalizing from personal experience in questioning about the value of learning foreign langugages. Totally fair, as I thought I made clear when I said that my question was based "on what is admittedly the worst of all sample sizes of one: myself." He also makes a point that was raised by my colleagues here on the Education Sector policy team, who are generally a lot smarter about these issues than I am: it's dumb to wait until late middle school or high school, as I did, to start learning a foreign language.

So how about this: make foreign language a mandatory part of the curriculum for students in elementary school, since that's when children are in the language acquisition and development stage. Moreover, don't make it any old language. Make it Spanish, for everyone, since that's far and away the most commonly-spoken foreign language in this country, by at least a factor of ten. Then when students get to secondary school, include a mandatory curricular element focused on learning about diverse cultures, global geography, etc., which might or might not include additional instruction in a variety of foreign languages, depending on student interest.

In other words, concentrate foreign language instruction during the stages of development when students are most likely to benefit, in the language that they're most likely to use. Then give them the chance to continue that course of study later on, but only if they want to. This seems better than the way things worked when I was in school (and I'm pretty sure my experience was, and is, fairly typical), which often involved spending a lot of time studying French, German, and/or other languages that relatively few people in this country or the world at large actually speak.

The forseeable objections of Lou Dobbsian nativist crazy people aside, would this be a good idea?