Ignore the panic. There’s little point learning languages at school | Simon Jenkins

Reactionary educators fetishise languages because they are easy to test. But the obsession with measuring comes at the expense of true education

Education policy is like defence policy. It is always fighting the last war but one. Predictable woe has greeted the plummeting number of pupils studying modern languages, which have fallen by roughly 10% in a year and German by one-third since 2010. Only Chinese and Arabic look reasonably healthy – I wonder if this might be because rising numbers of...