Teaching French, not French Toast
REFLECTION
Teaching French, not French Toast.
Notes on Survival, Style, and Subjunctives
by Dany Jacob
In the American Midwest where I teach, French is more likely to appear on a brunch menu than in a college curriculum. The irony of a nation that savors French toast but sidelines French language and culture, frames the reality I want to examine here. While my daily work as a teacher certainly matters, this piece is not about classroom technique. It is about the cultural landscape in which language learning itself has been devalued, and the consequences of that loss. To understand what is at stake, we must look beyond the classroom to the wider forces that determine whether languages survive or disappear from public life.
French on Life Support
A decade ago, my pedagogical supervisor in grad school told me that as a native French speaker I held a special position, offering students an authenticity they could rarely encounter without going abroad. In smaller institutions especially, international presences are uncommon, as are culturally enriching encounters where students realize that maybe, just maybe, there are interesting things outside of the US and not accessible in English. At the time, in the 2010s, New York State universities still required at least two semesters of a foreign language as part of their general education. That requirement has now disappeared; languages have since come to be seen as either too difficult, too challenging, too effortful, or of no real concrete use. What was once an academic pillar is now treated as a pesky elective.
The Modern Language Association reports a 16.6% drop in language enrolments in US higher education since 2009, one of the steepest declines in decades.1 For French, in particular, enrolments dropped by 23.1%, with 164 fewer institutions reporting enrolment between 2016 and 2021. This data signals not only a statistical decline, but a profound shift in how American students value (or rather fail to value) the work of learning another language. The statistics only tell part of the story. In small towns across the Midwest, I am introduced at social events and immediately asked if I’m French, Canadian, or simply “good at accents”. When I answer that I teach French, the responses often range from embarrassed jokes to proud recollections of a few words learned long ago. These encounters are light-hearted on the surface, but they reveal how foreign languages are treated: as novelties, not necessities. There is a bittersweet comedy in being both exoticised and invisible, welcomed as a token of cultural prestige, yet marginalised in every budget meeting. French food, fashion, and cinema are celebrated as sophisticated contributions to global culture, but the French language, the very medium of these ideas, is discarded as impractical.
I recall countless conversations with administrators who equated enrollment numbers with value. Their message was blunt: languages do not “pay for themselves”. From the administrative angle, foreign languages are a glaring deficit in the university’s budget. Traditionally having smaller class sizes to support interpersonal communication, the students-to-instructor ratio of language courses pales in comparison to other disciplines (like STEM for example) who rely on larger lecture halls to instruct. This mindset leads to administration allotting more resources to STEM programmes while smaller programmes are targeted for failing to break even. That rationale is especially true at tuition-dependent institutions.2
The result is a vicious circle: fewer classes lead to fewer students, which in turn leads to fewer faculty, and eventually to no program at all. It aligns with what has been described as the “program death spiral”, in which the disappearance of even one language course in a semester sends a message to students that the subject is dispensable.3 Once cut, programs rarely return. As Paul Jay has argued, language and literature departments are particularly vulnerable because their value is less easily captured by market logic.4 Similarly, Martha Nussbaum warns that once programs are hollowed out, rebuilding them requires decades of investment, that universities are rarely willing to commit to.5 I watched this play out in my own department at a previous institution: two tenure lines gone, justified by the mantra that “the numbers aren’t there”.
It all came down to pluses and minuses, checks and balances, it seemed. Unlike a liberal arts college where the entire institution rests on a principle of interdisciplinary education in the humanities and social and natural sciences, public universities are locked into elevating their specialised programmes. They are forced to compete for students and resources at a national and international level, thus forgoing the importance of “soft” transferable skills. And yet, these are precisely the skills that global employers emphasise: adaptability, intercultural communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving across contexts. Ironically, universities market themselves aggressively as preparing students for a competitive global workforce, but in cutting language programs they undercut the very training that distinguishes their graduates. In this paradox, transferable skills are both celebrated and sacrificed, depending on the budget line.
To measure value only in credit hours and budget lines is to forget that the humanities exist not only to produce workers. It is about what kind of citizens universities claim to shape. Most tout critical thinking and global citizenship, yet cutting languages undermines both. The message to students is clear: grappling with a new worldview is optional. The message to faculty is worse: your language, your culture, your very identity are “unserviceable”.
Across the Pond
The situation in the UK mirrors these patterns. While required at primary school and early secondary school stage, language learning is on the decline. There are similarities here with some American states that have implemented a language requirement in middle and high school, but motivation collapses after age fourteen.6 As I am reading a series of reports on the UK “language crisis”, I am seeing, time and time again, clear parallels between the two systems. Reports warn that the UK ranks far behind its European neighbours, a problem with clear consequences for trade, diplomacy, and security. The British Academy warned that declining numbers of language graduates threatened not only cultural literacy but also the nation’s competitiveness. In 2019, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Languages went so far as to call the shortage “a disaster” for the UK’s future.7
To a polyglot like me, it seems like the dominance of English breeds complacency. What is the incentive to step outside the comfort of being in the linguistic majority? Brexit amplified this inward turn, aligning with U.S.-style “English-only” rhetoric. Pre-Brexit, I pictured the U.K. to be a thriving and supportive space for foreign language instruction. Now, solidarity feels frayed; a European scholar of French language and culture would more likely be treated as an outsider than as a collaborator.
Some British colleagues confess the same frustrations: students see languages as optional extras, not intellectual investments. A few even describe foreign languages as a “niche subject”.8 But is it really a luxury to understand how others think and communicate? In an age of global crises, from pandemics to climate change, the ability to communicate across borders is not a novelty but a necessity. Here again is that bittersweet comedy: institutions praise internationalisation, while simultaneously dismantling the very skills that make it possible.
The UK’s language crisis has a striking connection to the one in the US. Both countries export a powerful linguistic commodity, English, and both suffer the consequences of their dominance. Monolingualism becomes a default posture, one that discourages the vulnerability of making mistakes in another tongue. What students and administrators don’t seem to understand is that particular vulnerability is the very condition of growth. To speak haltingly in another language is to recognise one’s own limits and to acknowledge the humanity of those who meet you halfway. That lesson cannot be outsourced to Google Translate.
La Résistance…with a Side of Syrup
Despite geographic distance, resistance to foreign languages feels oddly synchronised across the Anglophone world. One of my students once sent me a meme: Maury asking a girl if she speaks French, and her replying, “Yes – French fries and French toast”. It was meant as a joke, of course, but it was cutting a little close to home for me. Language had been reduced to cuisine. Worse: the language has been reduced to stereotypical cuisine. What gets lost in this reduction is not simply grammar or vocabulary, but the recognition that languages shape how people think, relate and imagine the world.
Occasionally, students glimpse this truth. In one lesson on the subjunctive, a student complained: “It makes no sense!” I explained that in French, saying “I think” implies truth, because Descartes’s cogito ergo sum lingers in the grammar itself. Groans followed, but a point was made: speaking French is not just about words, but about entering a worldview shaped by centuries of philosophy, history, and habit. While the rules of using subjunctive versus indicative might seem arbitrary, it is about figuring out what your emotional state is while uttering a sentence. Are you doubtful? Are you certain? Are you happy? Are you observing a fact? This small detail has ramifications that native speakers pick up subconsciously. Words have meaning – they matter.
In this sense, teaching French often feels like resistance with a side of syrup. The brunch metaphor is not just playful, but also political: when French toast is easier to celebrate than French language, insisting on the difficulty of grammar, nuance and style becomes an act of resilience. It means carving out space for complexity in a culture that prefers the comfort of the familiar.
The Cost of Losing Languages
The consequences of neglect are far-reaching. By 2050, Africa will host the largest French-speaking population in the world, yet most US and UK universities treat French as a relic of colonial empires rather than as a living global language.9 Students drawn to French for humanitarian, business or environmental work often assume that English and perhaps a few phrases from Duolingo will carry them through. But negotiating projects abroad requires far more: cultural sensitivity, awareness of history, and the humility to recognise how language carries memory and power. No app can replicate the slow, frustrating, deeply human work of learning to see through another’s eyes.
I once reminded a class of this very point when I told them that making mistakes is inevitable; they were learning a second language while I was teaching them in my fourth. The room shifted. They realised that language is not a test to be passed but a shared struggle, a negotiation of meaning. That shared vulnerability is precisely what prepares students for the unpredictable encounters of global life. To reduce language to vocabulary lists or quick digital fixes is to miss its most essential gift: the practice of humility and the capacity for connection.
Keeping languages on the curriculum is about intellectual and cultural health. Higher education claims to prepare students for meaningful contributions to society, but without languages, those contributions risk being monolingual, monocultural, and narrow. If French goes away, how are native English speakers to learn that, besides word order, verb tense, idioms, or intonation, the subjunctive mood also impacts pointedly speech acts? The subjunctive, a prominent feature in French, is but one of the many examples of linguistic structures and strategies providing a powerful entry point for non-native speakers to grasp how language encodes uncertainty, desire, and doubt; all the subtle shades English tends to flatten. Yet, the lesson of the subjunctive – that language is more than a vehicle for facts – is a lesson that applies to the study of any language and underscores why all foreign languages are vital to a complete education.
At the end of each semester, I receive notes from students who say French helped them see the world differently or even see themselves differently. For some, the subjunctive finally clicked. For others, the reward was more personal: a new confidence, a new openness, a new way of listening. Those small transformations matter. They prove that languages do more than fill credit requirements, they shape identities and futures.
These reflections remind me that choosing French or any foreign language is more than a course selection. In a world where French toast is easier to digest than French language, choosing to study languages is an act of resistance. What gets lost when we reduce language to brunch is not just grammar, but access to other ways of thinking, other ways of being. That loss is not only academic; it is cultural, ethical, and profoundly human.
DANY JACOB received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo and he is currently Assistant Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. His research examines the dandy’s role in Western sociocultural philosophy, exploring its impact on modernity, aesthetics, and masculinity. Current projects include transnational dandyism and disruptive aesthetics.
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Edited by JOSH WEEKS
Proofreading by FLORA SAGERS
Lead image by Vicky Ng via Unsplash.
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