Bravo!

"Continuous, articulated and compulsory" and "high academic standards at all times" - exactly!

Australians must stop finding excuses for avoiding the compelling task at hand. It is absurd that so many bemoan the time / resources needed, while entertaining an unwitting insult against all of us by saying that it is all too hard.

I applaud Jo Lo Bianco's emphasis on the inherent but neglected and wasted resources. The matter of standards and implied call for strong leadership here are commendable too. Why not return a standard of "one European, one Asian" for language curricula, then we can be free of both defeatism and the Esperantists' distraction?

A very useful summation of an urgent national priority. Building bilingual language capability through the education system is as important an act of nation-building as the Snowy Scheme.

I do agree very much that being bilingual has many advantages. And parents can have bilingual children even if they both have the same native language. Esperanto is a language that can be learnt when you start being pregnant and that you can master well enough by the time your baby is born. My parents had different native languages so I learnt French and German from birth and was introduced to Esperanto only at the age of 6.
I do think that Esperanto would be the ideal first foreign language to teach. It doesn't take too much time, it boosts children's self-esteem , helps in the study of further languages, opens up to lots of different cultures and not just one like it would be the case if Japanese is chosen. Starting with an easy language creates a love for languages.
PS I have a LOTE teaching certificate specifically for Esperanto awarded by the University of NSW.

One day all languages bar English will go the way of Latin. There is a reason for English becoming the world language - and it is because the problems of the world are more efficiently solved if we can all communicate with each other.

Efficiency and not sentiment is the name of the game. Our engineers would not be very productive if there were 100 different ways of doing calculus.

Healthwatcher - what a sad comment on cultural diversity. I doubt you are correct. Gaelic (the language of my ancestors) speakers are on the rise again. Yes, many people would consider it utterly useless but it has an immense heritage that people now wish to preserve. Other languages in danger of being lost are being preserved.
The understanding we would lose would be immense. Many Gaelic proverbs alone are worthy of preservation - and not just in English translation. Or what about the poetry of someone like Pablo Neruda? The original Spanish is often immensely powerful stuff. Or try the philosophy of someone like Hammarskjold. Auden admits in the introduction to Markings that it was an enormous task and not altogether satisfactory.
Translation always loses something of the original. It's a sort of incomplete theft.

Great piece Joe, particularly the bit about our littlies having to "unlearn" something and then there being a need for massive funds to get them doing it again...

The commentary about all languages going the way of Latin is an interesting one...and there is a fundamental misconception here: Latin didn't die, it spawned all of the Romance languages AND it continued to have an ecclesiastical role in Europe long after it was no longer a means of daily communication...the point is that ENGLISH is more likely to end up "doing a Latin" and refracting into many other linguistic forms precisely because it will be spoken by people who don't abandon their own languages...this will do exactly what Joe has said and leave the monolingual monocultural anglophones behind...

P.S. Calculus is a Latin word...