Unpopular Opinion
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I took a few years of French in high school, it was part of our requirements to get a certain amount of language credits as long as you weren't in remedial classes in which case you got extra classes in those subjects instead, never got close to fluent at it, but I probably knew enough to get by if I ever happened to mysteriously wake up somewhere in France one day, but I never had a chance to really use it in the real world and of course since I only took it to check off that requirement I dropped it as soon as I had enough credits so that I could take other electives that I actually wanted to take instead. So now over a decade later I've pretty much forgotten all of the French I knew.
Probably would have had a better outcome if we started language classes earlier and made them mandatory the whole way through school. Of course then you have the issue of where do you fit language into the school day, I don't really want to take time away from other subjects, nor do I want to extend the day any longer than it already is. And from a budget standpoint, unless your other teachers are already bilingual, that means hiring at least one language teacher and probably several, so it's a tough nut to crack.
I think there's also the issue of which languages to offer. My school district offered Spanish, French, and Latin. Honestly none of those languages particularly interested me, I basically chose French because I liked that teacher the best. I can definitely appreciate the utility of speaking Spanish in the US, so that seems obvious, but, at least in my area, I dont encounter many French speakers, so probably not the most useful language option, I'd probably get more use out of Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese, Swahili, Korean, Mandarin, or Cantonese (in no particular order, those are probably the most common languages besides Spanish that I've used translators for working in my local 911 center, I've used a French translator exactly once in the over 5 years I've been here, I've used it for Haitian Creole more than that, which is mostly French-based but not totally mutually intelligible and has its own translators)
French can certainly be useful for living, working, or traveling to some countries, but not all of them. Aside from France and parts of Canada, I don't personally have any major French -speaking destinations on my list of places I really want to visit before I die, though I do have plenty of places that speak a plethora of other languages on that list.
It's a shame that something like Esperanto never caught on as an international auxiliary language.