Learning languages is a foreign concept to today's youngsters There is a disgraceful, contra-popular answer. To study the Classics gave you a world of your own, which you first had to, and then chose to, furnish with your own selection of cultural furniture. Learning a foreign language is a kind of play-acting: you have to pretend to be an ancient Roman, or a Frenchman or an Italian woman, in order to get things right. Languages, ancient and modern, give the mind a change of clothes. What greater petty pleasure is there than to be in a foreign country and to be taken, however briefly, for a native? All the world is a stage. Play-acting, especially the costume and make-up side of it, is the common ambition of young people. Foreign languages extend your range and - best of all - enable you to have a sense of what it is not to be stuck forever in one mental and cultural gear. The first "foreign" language that French schoolchildren learn is French. At home, French children may well speak all sorts of local dialects. Once they go to primary school, they are all taught French grammar - no option. Once they have learnt it, they are said to know how to "reason." Of course there is comedy in the idea that the French are reasonable people, but it is true that however appalling his or her views, no French politician or public figure can speak ungrammatically without appearing ridiculous. One of the key problems in the British system is that English itself has been permitted to turn into a variety of sub-languages. In what now passes for the public culture, no way of speaking is allowed to be regarded as crass, ungrammatical or unreasonable (in case some category of voter takes offence). The cliché rules and the prime cliché is that all opinions and all forms of speech are as good as each other. As a result, our politicians dare say nothing, up and down the country, that is not vacuous, in case they lose votes. We don't even have an articulate reactionary (as Enoch Powell was) or a convincing Left-wing nutcase (as Michael Foot became). In the public prints, in parliament and on the box, English itself, as a source of irony, eloquence, poetry, is now a foreign language. If young people are told that education means being of use to people such as Lord Sugar, who fakes being rude and tyrannical the better to teach his audience to like and, if they can, practise rudeness and tyranny, it is not surprising that they see no dividend in foreign languages. But the joy of language lies in the freedom it gives you. No one has to be, or should even want to be, himself or herself all the time. To travel in space and in time (by reading French or Spanish or Italian, all with a Latin base, of course) is a form of freedom that no politician can bestow. To travel under genuine false colours is a liberty no tour operator can supply. Bon voyage.