Language Learning is the Hard!
This Corner posting is just plain factually wrong, obviously so to just about everyone who has lived outside the USA. Considering that essentially every single person in the Philippines speaks multiple languages…is every single one gifted and talented?
Sure, if you start trying to teach every American schoolchild Spanish starting at age 12, not that many would ever be fluent. But there are benefits to speaking multiple languages non-fluently. I would guess that more than half would be capable of reaching some level of fluency, if they kept with it–but isn’t the real nature of this complaint that we shouldn’t be so demanding of our poor children?