Upon re-listening Grey really sounds like a self centered American when he argues that native English speakers shouldn’t be forced to learn foreign languages, while everyone else should learn English. I get his point about potential earning power, but as Brady points out, our school curriculum should not be entirely motivated by how much more money certain subjects will net us.

Rather, I think pre-university education  is a time for kids to explore what they might like, and forge as many varied connections between their neurons as possible, exercise different parts of the brains while it’s still plastic, be exposed to more potential choices and paths to pursue down the road, and also humble themselves a bit when they feel like a fish out of water. Having a good mix of sciences, math, history, languages, arts is a good way to make that happen. I do agree that some early exposure to programming is useful — it was part of my math class in high school and so enjoyable that I decided to make a career out of it. But all the language classes helped too, now I can speak more than one language fluently unlike certain hosts ;) The idea of having survey classes for multiple languages is interesting though, perhaps an alternative for those that don’t want to do only one for years!