PS: Whilst I expect that American children don't get taught Latin these days, was it ever taught up there in high school (not sure what you folk call schools that teach teenagers)?
Up here, the elementary schools start in kindergarten and go from grades 1-6 in most towns. Grades 7-8 are called either middle school or junior high school. Grades 9-12 are high school. After that, secondary education is mostly called college, which differs from most of the rest of the world where they call it university and consider a college to be a trade school.
Latin used to be taught in private catholic schools, but I don't remember it being taught in public schools at least in my lifetime. It is still taught in law and medical schools, though. Where I work, our mission statement is in Latin, and there's an ongoing debate on whether a proper English translation should include the word "the" because it changes the meaning significantly.
New York State's school curriculum required 2.5 years of foreign language for all college-bound high school students when I was in school. Our school district was small (graduating class of 86 people), and they could only afford one language teacher and Spanish was the only option. It actually came in handy in Quebec, Canada of all places as a teen, where they refused to put up English signs at the time and everything was in French. The romantic (Latin-based) languages (Italian, Spanish, French, and Portuguese) are similar enough where you can make heads-or-tails out of the common words like days on a no parking sign and compass directions on highway signs to find your way back to the USA.
I'm going to agree with Uwe and say that I wish we started foreign languages earlier here. I learned hex math and ASCII in junior high school, and can read ASCII-encoded hex bytes as easy as written text. As far as my Spanish goes, my diet is limited to chicken and rice, and I could probably remember enough to ask for a bathroom and a prostitute.
Funny story - We were on a cruise about 8 years ago, and had a port call in Cozumel, Mexico. They had a VW dealership on the island, although obviously in a non-tourist neighborhood far away from the pier. It took me 10 minutes to convince a local cab driver that I wanted to go to the VW dealership (where they sell cars) and not to a car rental place. He barely spoke English, and my Spanish couldn't find the proper words for "car store" versus rental place. Anyway, we did finally get there...but came home empty-handed because the dealership was closed.
All that I wanted was a few brochures for cars/trucks that we don't get in the USA.....