CHINESE: IT’S NOT JUST FOOD

Do You Speak Any Other Language Besides TXT?

As high schools and colleges near the annual rituals for graduation, the nagging question of “What’s wrong with our education system?” appears in many publications. Nearly half of the graduating high school seniors will be seeking some kind of work or trying to adjust to life without high school. Around two-thirds of graduating college seniors will be heading home to live with the “folks” and trying to figure out a way to pay back $40,000 in student loans.
Even though I believe that our educational problems are not isolated to educational institutions, I think there are some things worth looking at with respect to focus. First, USA Today reported recently that over 22 million Chinese school students are learning English. In the US, they estimated that around 2500 students are learning Chinese. Hence, the first problem with American education is the widespread arrogance that the English language will continue to dominate the world markets. Anyone for a little Star Spangled Banner salsa-style?
It will be very difficult for Americans to compete with China in the global marketplace if they can’t speak the language of over 1 billion people. And while Chinese students are studying American culture for the express purposes of marketing their products to US consumers, I doubt if many American students are trying to understand the Chinese culture and how to market to them.
Second, we are leaving behind learning as a scholarly discipline. American education at all levels, including college, is focused on vertical learning or the orderly accumulation of knowledge. When knowledge was “stable” and may last a generation or more, this approach served us well. Now, with the turnover of knowledge occurring in 6-month intervals, vertical learning creates obsolescence within a year of leaving school. Those new graduates who decline to invest in ongoing educational efforts will begin to lose ground and fall behind before the ink is dry on their diploma.
Finally, our approach to education (ie, vertical learning) insists that we be “right.” It’s hard to encourage innovation when you have to be “right” all the time. If Thomas Edison lived now and followed the doctrine of “right”, there would be no dry cell batteries or light bulbs. To paraphrase Edison, his mistakes were one step closer to the solution.
Learning used to be about making mistakes and learning from failed efforts. Now, schools test and colleges manufacture employees. If the best our educational systems can produce is millions of consumers and employees, then I guess we don’t need to learn Chinese. They will gladly give us our daily work assignments in English.