Futurespeak: The Case for Teaching Your Child Chinese
want to give your child a leg up in the global economy of tomorrow? teach them chinese.
2008-02-18
By Jennifer Brea
At least that was the logic five years ago, before China's economy hit the stratosphere with a steady 9.5% growth rate, before Beijing started flexing its muscle on the international stage, and before virtually every product in your household, from t-shirts, to microwave ovens, to Fido's dried food (for better or worse) all became Made in China.
Tomorrow is clearly already here. Parents no longer talk about China's potential, but how best to prepare their children to thrive in this changed world. And so with China's status as the world's next superpower all but assured, Mandarin, the lingua franca of 1.3 billion people (or about one in five human beings on this planet), has become one of the fastest-growing foreign languages taught in American schools and universities.
Since 2002, the number of college students learning Chinese increased 51 percent. Many of these new Mandarin learners, and the parents behind the push to bring Chinese into the classroom, are lured by the practical benefits of speaking Chinese. With the deep integration of the US and Chinese economies, and China's economic boom showing no signs of abating, business and employment opportunities for young professionals with fluent Chinese and English are abundant, not only in the US or China, but around the world.
Chinese investment and trade with Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean have exploded in the last five years, putting African-Americans in a special position to benefit from fluency in Chinese. There's a growing demand for multi-lingual, global cosmopolitans of color who can navigate the cultures of a boardroom in Barbados just as easily as one in Beijing.
Knowing Chinese will allow your child access to one of the world’s oldest and most influential civilizations and the opportunity to develop new intellectual interests and a different perspective on the world, whether his or her passions tend toward art, literature, history, philosophy, drama, music, cinema, martial arts or cuisine.
Chinese is of course not a language for the faint-hearted. According to the institute that trains American diplomats in foreign languages, it can take the average English speaker 1,320 hours to attain proficiency in Chinese, nearly three times longer than a romance language like French or Italian. Basic literacy requires knowledge of three thousand characters; all the more reason to start early.
Despite Mandarin's soaring popularity, the number of students actually studying the language remains small. According to a report by the Asia Society, only about 24,000 middle school and high school students are learning Chinese, compared to the 175 million Chinese learning English. It's not for want of demand. Difficulty securing funding and finding qualified teachers traditionally confined Chinese instruction to big cities, elite prep schools, or communities with large Chinese-American populations.
However, that is starting to change.
In Chicago and other inner cities, efforts are underway to bring Chinese to more low-income and minority students. Thanks in no small part to funding from the Chinese government, the College Board recently started offering an Advanced Placement course in Chinese Language and Culture, and school districts from Georgia to Washington are piloting programs to expose children to Chinese as early as kindergarten. Patience. Chinese may soon be coming to a classroom near you.
Jennifer Brea is a freelance writer and photographer based in Beijing. She writes for the Guardian, the Scotsman, the BBC and other publications. Later this month she launches a global culture column, The New World, exclusively for EbonyJet.com
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