Lingua Franca

Obama doesn't like English Only, which is one thing, but the rest of his ideas about second languages aren't that well argued.

He says we should be more like Europeans who comes over here and speak English. Well, sure, it'd be great if more Americans learned a second, third, fourth language, but there are reasons Europeans do that, and they're a lot more compelling. 1) Since they live in smaller countries, amongst other nations that don't speak their language, of course they'll be more multi-lingual. (Some of their countries even have more than one official tongue.) 2) English has become the universal language of business, so of course they'll want to learn it.

More troublesome, when someone brings up teaching non-English-speaking kids English, Obama says it's more important American kids learn to speak Spanish. This is apples and oranges. The idea of teaching everyone English in the USA, and teaching it well (i.e., kids taught to speak it without a heavy accent), is for a unifying language the whole country can understand. That's not the reason we should learn Spanish (yet) or French, Germanb, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, whatever.