Normally, I agree that education is about more than workplace skills. But. There is a place for realism! I have been paying good money to study languages over the few years for two reasons:
A) Because I have always loved them (but when I was 16 I thought literature was compulsory), and;
B) Because I think it will be a marketable skill.
I am, should my plans pan out, going to be taking a student loan out, for the same reasons!
Have a look at A Level MFL rates. German is down to less than 5,000 students. To put that in perspective, 86,000 completed an A Level in Maths from the same cohort! If you deducted everyone who abhors analysing literature from my present A Level course, 60-80% would be gone! And some of them are gifted, natural linguists.
You are still assuming (like Gove) that what you like is more worthy. You think accessing scientific reports is dry. Yet I have known people learn Latin, just so they could read Newton in the original! You may remember reading classical authors with nostalgia. Others (like me) have nightmares about the appetiser of nice books and disgusting main course of taking it all apart that was Eng Lit. And still others felt that the whole thing was utterly irrelevant! Which group should be served at the expense of the rest? Why is classical literature always regarded as more intellectual than reading about discoveries developed through the use of the scientific method? It can't be anything spiritual, because I've found before that reading Caeser in the original wins pseudo-intellectual pretension competitions because it's Latin. Yet he wrote about troop movements!
Now, if you (or your child) should enrol on a language course, whether GCSE, A level or degree, I would expect you to want to learn the language. In order to, you know, communicate in it. I myself want to be able to think in my chosen ones, not translate from English constantly!
That doesn't necessitate literature (and some would say years of literature will impede you when you actually go to Sachsen or Bavaria ). 