English Instruction and Policy

Inspired by Max's last post, I went online in search of a site that commented on the connection between language instruction and policy with regard to "power" languages.  We had spent the past week in class talking about European languages dominating Africa during the colonial and post-colonial eras, and we speculated about the current prowess of English.

Well it turns out that the world outside Duke is also interested in these kinds of issues.  One blog post describes the difficulties in teaching English today.  I was particularly interested in his discussion of English in the Soviet Union, where he describes the "havoc" that teaching English to younger and younger students wreaked on the educational system as a whole.  Instead of teaching students fundamental skills in their local languages, instruction of the most economically viable language often takes away from students' other courses while adding a marginal amount if "power language" [my words] instruction.

So, should a government promote power-language instruction to increase the economic viability of its young citizens, or should a government promote multilingualism? To me, the answer falls somewhere in between either extreme (didn't we agree that binary models never really work?).  To respond to my own question with an example by Haarman, I think that while a country like the Soviet Union should have promoted Russian language acquisition, I feel they failed at adequately supporting local languages, and therefore promoted an "us vs. them" mentality.  In the same way, I don't think English should dominate schools abroad at the cost of creating a regional, ethnic, or cultural divide.