Despite the demographic of 42 million Latinos in the U.S., it is still a struggle for Latino parents to instilL the Spanish language in their children. See story here.

In the meantime, Pres. Bush declared Chinese a priority language for national security. The program’s price tag (for the selected languages, which does not include Spanish) is a cool $114 million. The Dept. of Education gets a $35 million increase, or $57 million, for its foreign language program.

Learning languages is nice. In fact, if anyone knows how I can get a piece of the action, I’d be grateful for the tip. But it’s a Cold War approach, those foreigners against us. 200 million Chinese are learning English, who cares if Latino children lose the ability to speak Spanish? Learning Chinese or Arabic is now the patriotic thing to do. Not because we want to celebrate diversity, but because U.S. national security depends on it. Is this the only way to make Americans value foreign cultures and languages?