mohammad al-rubaie, an academic professor at the university of dublin, said he was surprised by iran’s decision to ban teaching english in elementary schools calling it a ‘cultural invasion’ and instead the iranian ministry of culture was promoting persian language and islamic culture at the elementary schools level. al-rubaie commented on this decision saying: “iran did not learn from the lessons of other countries, such as libya’s gaddafi and jamal abdelnasser of egypt, who preceded iran in such destructive decisions and the damage it infl icted on the libyans and the egyptians. most children of the world study english at elementary level – 93 percent of them in europe and other countries.” al-rubaie summed up the following points on the importance of teaching and learning a foreign language, especially for children: first, he said, it deepens communication and understanding with the outside world, when the learner can speak to others in their language, and benefi t from friendships across cultures in future, to gain wider employment opportunities, enjoy travel, and know the vision of others. two, it has shown that the bilinguals are better at carrying out multiple tasks; pay more attention and focus than speakers of one language. the brain scans of bilingual speakers show more gray matters in the brain area that control executive functions. the hypothesis is that the effort exerted by people to choose the right language at the right time provides a mental acquisition activity for the second language, giving them extra power to focus their attention on. these benefi ts appear early, as recent researches show that infants less than one year of age who are exposed to multiple languages show sophisticated cognitive patterns in their brains, compared to infants who hear one language. in fact, some researchers argue that the best way to make children smarter is to expose them to multiple languages in their childhood. three, the studies on tens of thousands of high school students in america show the students who learned foreign languages performed better in the act test of english and mathematics. the act english test is a 75-question, 45-minute test that measures your understanding of the conventions of standard english (punctuation, usage, and sentence structure), production of writing (topic development, organization, unity, and cohesion), and knowledge of language (word choice, style, and tone). four, the researchers have also shown that the performance of children who learn a foreign language is better in their native language than monolingual learners. other researchers have shown that children who learn a second language begin reading at an early age. in addition, bilingual children are better at knowing the incorrect linguistics than their monolingual peers. five, the children are like sponges when it comes to learning any language. researches show that there is a ‘critical period’ in language learning when the brain is ready to learn during childhood and after puberty the ability to acquire the second language declines. six, at the cornell university, associate professor katherine kinsler tested the single-language and bilingual children and proved that children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide a routine practice in knowing the views of others, that is, they think about who speak that language and who understands its content, as well as in times and places where the meanings of language may vary. seven, some studies have shown that people who regularly speak a second language are delayed with the symptoms of alzheimer’s disease. eight, sure, it gives a bilingual happiness for being able to talk to others in their mother tongue - not to mention a sense of achievement. but part of the fun of learning a foreign language is discovering differences in how people look at the world. it’s fun to think about, for example, why the dog ‘woo woo’ in english, ‘wang wang’ in chinese mandarin, ‘qua wa’ in spanish, ‘ho ho’ in french and ‘aw aw’ in arabic, though that the dog has one tone of barking. what is the right word? it is fun to discover words in a foreign language, which do not exist in your native language. in all of this, we conclude that there is a need to learn foreign languages very early in life, and the decision to dispense with teaching english in iran is stupid. we in kuwait preceded iran in this stupidity on the day we cancelled teaching english at the elementary level and then cancelled french. is there a sane and responsible offi cial who can put things in their right perspective?