One correction: I lived in France briefly (on and off for the equivalent of about two years), and I can attest to the fact that the French do not speak English better than the English, or better than anyone else, for that matter.

They do learn languages in school: They get two languages (one started midway through high school). In the U.S. we study one language in junior high/intermediate school and high school--just one.

But what does that add up to? My French friends simply ended up forgetting two languages instead of one. We Americans invariably take Spanish or French (in rarer cases, German or Italian; in even rarer cases, Japanese or Chinese), and end up remembering only a few phrases. The vast majority of French people I met were no better. The only ones who spoke any English were some business students in Paris. And while their English was good, it was not up to the standards of a native speaker. That's one point where Ms. Phillips is over-egging the pudding (did I get that express right?). Most of my other friends and acquaintances in Paris were monolingual.

Where you'll hear good English spoken is in Germany, I believe, and in some of the smaller countries, like Holland. They don't in France nor, it's my impression, in Italy.

It's a strange coalition of interests that benefits from the dumbing down of emerging generations. The marxists running education systems get their dissatisfied, malleable proletariat and the privileged classes face less competition from aspiring materialists from the underclass.

English is taught and spoken well by N Europeans, starting in Germany and improving when you get to Sweden. The French are awful....but they have a cultural problem, and the Germans dub every programme so you never hear the real voices of famous actors....at least DVD overcoms that import control.

The worst creation in Britain was the Secretary of State for Education = Gauleiter. Education was local in its origins, first Church, then Local Authority Elected Schoool Board.......then came the national parties in local politics, then the Gauleiter dictating that Collective Farms be made of the schools; now it is to 'federate' them so each good school becomes a Machine Tractor Station (MTS) and the various Kolkhoz Schools draw upon its resources.

Until parents pay term fees and control schools, Party Apparatchiks like Charles Clarke and shadowy 'advisers' will experiment at will, and the dysfunctional outcomes will be inflicted on society for the next 50 years.

I am currently taking a course in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. A considerable amount of our time is taken up by grammarlessons as it is regarded as essential to understand one's own language in order to teach it. We have been told that often foreign students have a an excellent knowledge of grammar; this is because they have had formal instruction in it, in their language and other languages they have studied in their own countries.

I am not surprised that foreign languages are being relegated in schools and as they are on the whole poorly taught; children cannot be expected to come to grips with a foreign language if they do not even understand their own. Our system is in effect depriving them of this knowledge.

It is yet another nail in the coffin for standards in education.

Rosemary

In business, I've observed that one of the major disadvantages American executives face, compared with their European counterparts, is that the Europeans usually have better language skills.

Many thanks the the British education bureaucrats for kindly handicapping their own populace and removing this disability from us.

Funny about Americans. A colleague told me that he found the Netherlands amazing, "A small country in Europe where so many people speak English !"

Yes, I said "We call it England"