After 9/11 I thought EVERYBODY should learn Arabic. But I’m not sure where this school is coming from.
I think we Americans do suffer from not learning other languages. It seems to me that most educated Brits have always learned French, but I could be wrong about that.
And only a generation ago most well educated Americans (at least Catholic ones like my parents) learned Latin.
The USA is almost 6,000 miles from Key West, Florida, to Nome, Alaska, with 300+ million English speakers. Nothing like it in world history. English has become the language of technology, too.
Just since the ‘60s, Japanese, Arabic and now Chinese seemed to be the ‘necessary’ language. Truth is, everybody in the world except the USA is migrating toward English.