In the television show Futurama, there is a running joke about the French language being dead and obscure in the distant future. I thought of this when I learned that students in Tisdale will not have the option to take core French as part of their regular school activities, though an online class will be offered. The North East School Division is saying that the class was dropped because of low enrolment, so the division thought it more advantageous to allocate teachers elsewhere.
Whether or not this is a good idea partially depends on whether or not the prophecy of the animated program is fulfilled. If French continues to matter, then the continued existence of a French program will continue to matter, whether or not the students in the school division realize it or not. If French is a dying language, then it doesn't make sense to learn it, and resources could be put into a different language.
In this case, I don't think I would put French on life support just yet. Yes, it's not as popular as some other languages in the world, but it remains one of the national languages of Canada, and as a result it's going to be necessary for a lot of people to have at least a basic understanding of it. It's a basic understanding that would even apply to jobs you would not expect, or even just being a tourist in certain areas of the country. Knowing the language, in Canada at a bare minimum, is helpful. Even just having a rough understanding of the language can be useful if you are forced into an area where you see a lot of French, as you would know the basic rules and be able to glean some meaning from what is seen and heard.
If French is not dead yet, and there is still value in the language, we are lead directly to the problem of the students, who have abandoned language courses en masse in that particular school division. The problem, then, is not that French is useless, it's that students are unaware of the potential use that the language might have in their every day lives. It's a common problem with a lot of subjects in the school system, one must convince a teenager that it is something of value, but teens frequently don't quite recognize something's worth. It's the same reason you see kids complain that they will never use complicated math in real life, even if they are using rough approximations of it to solve other problems. The applications of such things are not immediately obvious, but help your understanding of how things work.
The problem is that it's difficult to fully articulate the value of French. It's a class I found useful years later, but not because of any of the specific words and phrases I learned. I certainly couldn't tell you anything useful in French, the phrase "Le pamplemousse est dans la bibliotheque" is not going to find any practical applications, unless you habitually forget grapefruits in libraries. It's all about learning the rules, the ability to detect patterns and likely meanings in unfamiliar French sentences. It's not fluency, I would need much more advanced French classes for that, but it gives one the ability to muddle through, and the basic understanding would be helpful if I needed to fully learn the language.
Now that the class is being dropped, it is clear that something needs to be done, so kids can fully grasp the need to learn languages outside of their own.
