The New Republic's John McWhorter recently came out with an essay on why we should stop pretending French is an important language. The piece comes in response to a New York Times article about a new initiative from the French government to increase the amount of French instruction in American schools. To be sure, it's a little heavy handed for a foreign government to be attempting to quasi-infiltrate another country's education system. But here's why McWhorter's wrong, and w