They say...

They say that December 2008 was the coolest one on record for this century. January is already making up for that. My father is prowling around the house like a caged animal - unable to get out in the garden or the shed because of the heat. Being Sunday we are permitted to water this evening!
In the news this past week there have been mutterings about language teaching again. They say we should be teaching Chinese and Japanese. If we do choose to teach these things schools will need to devote a great deal more time to language learning than they do now. That is unlikely to happen. We would be much better off teaching French, German, Spanish and Arabic. We could also usefully teach Italian, Modern Greek, Indonesian and Vietnamese. All of these languages are of more value to the average Australian than Chinese or Japanese. Japanese is barely spoken outside Japan and certainly not by any communities that I am aware of. Chinese is a group of languages rather than a single language. The diversity means that learning standard Mandarin is not going to achieve much if you are doing business with a Cantonese or Hokkien speaker - and the reality is that they will prefer to do business in English, as do the Japanese and the Koreans.
Is it any wonder that most Australian children leave school effectively monolingual?
They also say that we should be considering resettling some of the inmates from Guantanamo Bay in Australia. I have to disagree. These men still have to be a potential threat. Indeed if they were not a threat earlier they are now. One of the retired US Generals is warning against it. Will the Rudd government listen? Probably not. They will probably take one or two who are no longer deemed to be a threat. It will be a compromist solution - and it takes just one rotten apple to turn a whole barrel.