Pathetic Britain!

Reading the newspapers recently, I came across the following facts:

• This summer, 362,338 pupils in Britain took a GCSE in a foreign language. A GCSE is a "General Certificate of School Examination", the exams that schoolkids take at the age of 15 or 16. (In my schooldays, back in the last millennium, the more or less equivalent exams were called "O Levels", with "O" standing for "Ordinary".)
• Of these pupils, 188,688 took a GCSE in French, still by far the most popular foreign language in Britain (well, at least measured in terms of the numbers taking the exams).
• The second most popular language was German, with 73,469 pupils taking a GCSE.

So, who says Britain is a country that is not interested in foreign languages and where many people simply shout louder in English if their interlocuters don't understand them?

Who says that? I'll tell you who says that. Pretty much everyone. And everyone is right.

The point is that, to know whether figues of any sort are really impressive, we need some basis for comparison, as this wonderful book makes clear.

And The Daily Telegraph made just such a comparison in a recent article. The total number of pupils taking a language GCSE fell from 559,115 in 2002 to 362,338 this year, a drop of 35.2 per cent.

GCSEs in French fell from 341,604 to 188,688 (minus 44.8 per cent) over the same period. For German, the drop was from 131,000 to 73,469 (minus 43.9 per cent).

These are unbelievably dramatic figures, particularly at a time when foreign languages are seen by pretty much everyone — correctly again — as increasingly important.

"This is precisely the opposite of what should happen in a world where national boundaries are less and less important," Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, told The Daily Telegraph.

Yes, there have been increases in the numbers of pupils studying Spanish and Chinese, but these don't compensate for the big falls elsewhere.

And what could be the cause of these dramatic drops? Surely not the government's absurd decision in 2004 to make the study of a foreign language voluntary after the age of 14?

The idea was if foreign languages became compulsory in primary schools, more pupils would go on to take GCSEs later. Er, doesn't seemed to have worked yet, does it?

Pathetic, Britain. Absolutely pathetic.