Should schools teach languages - or Language?

Were I to be raising children afresh, the question of which languages (other than Polish and English) should they learn next would be a difficult one. Parents in England, speaking only English, have a tough task. But anywhere in the non-English speaking world, the choice is clear - it must be English, the de facto lingua franca of Planet Earth.

The withering away of foreign language teaching in the UK on the basis that "Wherever I go today, Johnny Foreigner speaks reasonable English" is leading to a dangerously lazy insularity. But it's true - which language gives students the best return on the time they spent learning it? German? "Germans all speak English". French? "A spent force." Japanese? "A good idea 30 years ago." Mandarin? "Too complicated". So the default setting becomes "no foreign languages at all".

I offer a proposal for Britain's schools - radical and daring - which would at least prevent Brits from being dull monoglots and cultural hegemonists.

Children from first year primary right through to GCSE and 'A' Level should learn but one subject - Language. This course should offer, over the course of 14 years, a thorough overview of the major linguistic groups spoken on this planet, explaining alphabets - Roman, Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew - Far Eastern logograms; the main Indo-European linguistic groups, grammar, syntax, morphology; tone.

In other words - what language is, what languages have in common (doing words, naming words, describing words), what makes languages different (vocabulary, word order, inflections), and how we write in those languages.

Over 14 years, seven years in primary school, seven years in secondary school, the pupil will have become familiar with the script and the sound of Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese and Swahili as well as being able to tell German from Dutch, Russian from Ukrainian, Czech from Slovak, Serbian from Croatian, Korean from Vietnamese and Portuguese from Spanish.

Learning basic phrases of use in travel or business - ordering a taxi over the phone or asking directions to the train station - in many languages, rather than being able to read Flaubert or Nietzsche in the original, is more useful in today's globalised economy.

Rather than choosing one or two languages in great depth (which very few pupils do anyway), the emphasis should be on appreciating the diversity of human language and being equipped with a basic tool kit that gives a broad understanding of the building blocks of verbal and written communication.

This would give the edge to the English-speaking world; the rest of the planet's population would be busily learning English, while native speakers of English could all get to grips with the concept of Language from an early age. They'd never master any foreign language fully, but at least they would not find themselves fish out of water wherever they went, able to decipher a menu in Greek, recognise the Thai for 'fire escape' or say 'good morning' in Welsh.

I'd be very interested to know what you, dear reader, think of my proposal.

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More moaning about Karczunkowska's pavement deficit

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Architectural detail from Edinburgh

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Spring explodes in Jeziorki
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Along the way for Warsaw's southern bypass

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Quintessential Warsaw vista

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Jeziorki on Google Earth

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Okęcie airport, our near neighbour