The debate over whether Japanese children should be taught English at primary school deserves better consideration than it is getting.
Currently Japanese school children begin to learn English at age 12 in middle school. The teaching continues in high school for another three years, with often a year or two at university to follow. But the results, as the world knows, are not very good. Some note the superior English-speaking abilities of other Asian peoples, most of whom begin to learn English in primary school. They want to see the same in Japan.
But the conservatives in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and elsewhere claim primary-school English will damage the minds of young Japanese still trying to master their own language -- a claim that leaves unexplained the lack of any apparent damage to the many bilingual or trilingual children around the world, and in Japan.