There is a difference between forbidding the use of a language within the faily and the neighborhood, which was what was done then, and having an official language for official use or use in the public sphere.
The big problem is that not everyone is a linguist. I speak three germanic languages reasonalby fluently, one romance language well enough for everyday conversation, one slavic language well enough to get me in big trouble, and one finno-ugric language badly enough to set even a dour Scandinavian into giggles (now THAT is an achievment!). All of these languages except German and English I learned as an adult. I lived in a monolingual English home in California.
Most people have their hands full learning to express themselves well and competently in their mother tongues, because, for one thing, the schools that i have been in contact with have been simply awful when it comes to teaching languages. We Americans are not expected to learn, really. Even English classes spend so much time hung up on esoteric descriptions of prescriptive grammar (which are usually passed on Latin anyway) that actually USING the language seems to take a far second or third to diagraming sentences.
Being mildly dyslexic, prescriptive grammars and flexion charts only made learning languages much harder than it could have been for me. My brain just doesn't handle things that way, and I suspect that is the same for a lot of people. Give me the chance to USE the frigging system, and then I can learn it!
However most languages are taught by using books and techniques that are written and designed by "linguists" who learn the languages from books and by memroizing rules from books according to traditions that stretch back hundreds of years. My guess is that there are very few people for whom these techniques work well. Most folks I know who are bi or multi-lingual (my husband and oldest son among them) are people who were able to have a high standard of input in their home language at the same time they were educated in the "official" language. So, books in both English and Swedish. DVDs in English and Swedish. Both languages used in the home. Neither language was denigrated as a "kitchen language."
Having programs in Spanish, or partl in Spanish doesn't bother me, because if the quality and diveristy of the broadcast is good enough, it will actually give a child from a Spanish speaking family a better insight into how a language is used across the board, with nuances and meanings not always found at home. That encourages a better understanding of language in general and will also in the long run help their English, believe it or not.
JMHO, from the tower of Babel here.
Oh, Kathy, one of my hubby's first languages is Finnish. Here's to you!