By the way, having experienced the 1980s, I doubt that Japanese and Russian were examples of “if you build it, they will come.” Folks talked as if Japan (pre-endless recession) would take over the world economically, and Russia was the formidable, mysterious “other” that people thought they needed to know more about. I dated a few people taking those languages on grounds they were “important” — and they were hardly alone. Learning these languages (or at least the idea of doing so) was all the rage at the time, so I would be very surprised if boarding schools’ initial adoption of these languages was “top down”; it was probably in response to this same parental-societal groundswell. Of course this all turned out to be short lived, and now we look back on it as a fad…