Critics charge that French is the mother tongue of comparatively few people worldwide, and therefore a waste of instruction time. A table published with Steinberg's article asserts that only 2.2 percent of humanity are French speakers, comparable to Japanese, a language much less commonly taught in the US. But citing this statistic in this context is blatant sophistry. Yes, Japan's tightly-crammed population is roughly equivalent to the global francophone census. But this figure reveals nothing of relative surface area, a much more telling consideration. Japan is about the same size as Newfoundland, while Francophonie (the world's 52 French-speaking nations) touches approximately half of Africa and North America and significant swaths of Europe and Oceania. If we simply must compare languages' "usefulness", body-count is of no value. "It's territory, stupid."
The table also conveniently ignores the fact that only English surpasses French as an auxiliary in the West, and much of the rest of the world as well. I rely on French as often in Arab, Asian, and non-francophone African company as among native speakers. By this measure, French slams Japanese to the mat, and it doesn't get up again.
None of this implies that Japanese, or any other language, is unworthy of instruction. Indeed, numbers are largely irrelevant to the argument, which is fundamentally subjective. But the spineless wonders who shape American education policy find it much safer to chalk a sum on the blackboard and pronounce the conclusion foregone. Thus, in spite of the fact that French is an exceptionally "useful" language by most criteria, Americans increasingly consider it an anachronism.
Sadly, American French teachers are mostly to blame for this mess. I am reluctant to criticise teachers, since everyone else already does and in most instances, when you shove aside the political claptrap, you find that teachers are the only ones behaving responsibly. However, it's a painful fact that while French shines as a language of instruction, the way American teachers position it makes it seem a hair shy of totally worthless.
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