Why Should Schools Start Teaching Chinese?
Did you hear that two Montgomery public schools are going to add a new foreign language? Guess which language? Why, Chinese, of course.
It makes perfect sense -- if you live in liberal la-la land. Let's see, Montgomery has a Korean car manufacturing plant; the new county school superintendent recently visited Korea, but the educational bureaucrats decided to spend tax dollars on teaching the Chinese language.
It makes no sense trying to teach Chinese to teenagers who can barely communicate in English. But the liberal educators will never accept the fact that spending more and more money on more and more jazzy classes and snazzy programs does not produce young adults who are ready to contribute to society.
To see if the taxpayers are getting their money's worth, here is a public challenge for the new superintendent, Ms. Thompson. Please publish a report of the Sidney Lanier High School senior classes of 1958 and 2008.
Please compare the following: the number of students; the cost to educate each student (broken down into state and federal dollars); the percentage of students who graduated; and how much the spending and graduation rates have increased or decreased between 1958 and 2008.
Stan Alexander
Deatsville
What is it with Alabamians and their fear of an education? My husband used to work at a wire harness factory. One day he heard a redneck female co-worker say, "If any of my young'uns come home uh speakin' at Mexican shit I'll bust'em in the mouth."
Mr. Alexander let me explain to you why someone in the US and in Alabama needs to learn Chinese.
THE CHINESE OWN US! We owe them about $800 BILLION dollars. Perhaps it would be a good idea if we were able to communicate with them, no? There was a spectacular Saturday Night Live skit a few weeks ago about that. Watch it HERE
(h/t to ttownfeen for the link)
5 comments:
My 3-year-old daughter LOVES Chinese! We've been watching "Ni Hao, Kai-lan" and she picked up some there. Now, I've gone and ordered the kids software for her to play with. She's definitely a lot faster at picking it up than I am, though. I have a tough time keeping up with her. (We're doing the same thing with Spanish.)
And it's something I think will be USEFUL considering how much of the world population speaks Chinese.
My only regret is that we settled for Spanish and Chinese because those were the languages used in her favorite television shows. I really wanted to go with German, Italian, and/or Japanese.
I believe that a foreign language is required for college degrees today. I can get out of it since I "graduated" from high school so long ago. (I actually dropped out and immediately picked up my GED.)However I wouldn't mind learning a foreign language anyway.
Why Chinese? You are right in that the US is deep into debt with their government. They also manufacture the majority of our electronics as well as several other goods. I think that with some schools, your choice of languages is typically very limited; usually it is Spanish and if you’re lucky perhaps French and/or German. I think more language choices are a great idea for our schools.
I notice that whenever something gets the conservatives’ panties in a bunch, they immediately jump to the dreaded “l-word.” I think they use that term so much that even the conservatives don’t remember what it really means. To them, if it is not one of their beliefs, it is a liberal belief. What about us moderates who believe that both the far-right and far-left are completely nuts? Are we to be lumped in as one of the “dreaded” liberals?
So the school system is going to teach Chinese. To me that should be nothing to be feared; it is encouraging to see school districts adding rather than taking away programs. The nice thing is that they are adding an academic program. Usually it is the inclusion of a sports program and the dropping of an academic program to help pay for it. I am not against a good PE or sports program; just don’t forget you need good academics as well.
Why should we teach Chinese? Why not? The majority of industrialized countries require at least one additional language to be learned in order to graduate—the US has been one glaring exception. I have seen that people have been changing that and our students deserve to have a bigger choice than just Spanish. A limited choice is little better than no choice at all. If the students have a better choice of classes, then they can enjoy them a bit more and not build up resentment towards being forced to learn a specific foreign language.
If you really want to give a good reason to the conservatives, tell them that the Chinese-speaking students of today are tomorrow’s CIA agents. Lol Perhaps that may shut them up a little?
alamod..Good for your little girl! One thing I regret is not introducing my kids to a foreign language early in their lives. Last year they both wanted the Rosetta Stone software for Japanese...but that stuff is really expensive. I've been looking around for a used copy on Ebay.
This is the whole episode the aired the Obama in China clip, but it's the first thing so you don't have to skip around looking for it.
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/episodes/?vid=1178477
You rock ttownfeen. Thanks for posting the link. I am going to add it to the original post.
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