The public schools in my area have all been teaching Mandarin and Chinese culture to the kids from Kindergarten and on. I’ve never liked this one bit, for reasons that I’ll post here, and I’m entirely chaffed by the fact that they’ve spent $300,000 on the program with an additional $36,000 this year.

The program comes to an end this year. It’s been going for three. You can read a bit about it from our local newspaper: Computers will enhance Chinese program.

I just posted the following comment to the newspaper’s Comment section on the above linked article. Agree or disagree? Feel free to post either here or at the newspaper’s website.

I entirely agree that it’s important to learn about other cultures and languages, especially at an early age. The world is very global, and as time goes on we will only interact more with other cultures. I have had the pleasure of meeting people from Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, and other countries while attending Pittstate. It’s been one of my best experiences!

This program isn’t something that I have ever been happy with though, and I’ll admit up front that my reason for this is political. In my opinion, it is entirely inappropriate to be spending $336,000 to teach our impressionable young how to speak and behave as the Chinese do.

That sounds very close minded, so let me explain a bit more.

The kids have no idea the kind of atmosphere that the average Chinese person lives in. They should be introduced to Chinese culture at a time when they are old enough to understand the oppressive situation in which the people there live, NOT so early as to think that it’s all just beautiful culture, and NOT at such a young age that they’re not going to have the critical thinking skills required to seriously consider the information that they are given.

The money should have been spent with consideration to what the children are most likely to encounter in their lives. For example, Japan is a very important country, and considering the popularity of Japanese culture it is far more likely that these kids will find a use for the Japanese language than they will Mandarin. After all, when are they ever going to use Mandarin?

Japan has a long and important connection with U.S. history, and it would be doing the kids and teachers a great service to combine these very pertinent history lessons with the language and culture lessons. It would make the history lessons far more interesting than History generally is to a student, and it would make the people and events more “real” rather than “just stuff in a book”. The kids would learn a great deal more, and it would make the lives of the teachers far easier by increasing the interest of the students and by giving considerably more tools with which to teach. All of this, AND the kids would be learning about vital parts of U.S. history.

To spend this kind of money teaching them something that they’re going to forget and never find useful is wasteful. Doing so when the subject is the culture and language from an oppressive communist country and the children are too young to comprehend what this means is almost insulting.

The Chinese people who I have met have always been nice, or at the worse quiet and disinterested (which is not so bad, in all honesty). They probably enjoy the opportunity to talk and to share; something that they almost certainly have little (or no) opportunity to do OPENLY in their own country. That’s a great thing for them to be able to do and I would like to see this opportunity available to them, but only once the students are old enough to fully appreciate what it is that they’re learning about.

There’s a balance that must be struck here. Perhaps I’m ignorant of something pertinent to the program, but the entire concept of such a balance seems to have been entirely ignored.

I sincerely have no intention of offending anyone. Chinese culture, artwork, and even their language are all beautiful.

The program was a fantastic idea. A good language and culture class is one of the best things that we could do for our kids in the school system, and starting young is the best time to do this. The focus, however, was entirely inappropriate for all of the above reasons.

Really, really had to get that off of my chest.

Good day folks.

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