Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Singapore, Language Rights and America's College Professors
Sometimes the best way to understand the politics of an issue in the United States is to see how the same issue is handled in other countries. I found this item in the Singapore's Straits Times fascinating:
The head of the Chinese department at Anglo-Chinese School (Barker Road), Mr Peh Chin Cheok, agreed that society may perceive Chinese as the language of the less successful.
'Some may think that the English-educated are better off, as language can be a mark of social class, just as some think French is high-class,' he said
But this view is set to change, businessmen and clan leaders told The Straits Times, as knowledge of the Chinese language now opens doors for business and culture.
Said Mr Tan Koh Tiang, secretary of the Teochew Poit Ip Huay Kuan: 'With the rise of China, speaking Mandarin is nothing to be ashamed of and is an asset.'
A Chinese language professor thinks more kids should study Chinese. Who knew?
Replace "Chinese" with the name of any other foreign language and you will understand one of the major forces pushing bilingual education, bilingual ballots and all the rest in the United States. The more mandatory multilingualism that exists, the greater the demand for the services of language teachers, which means higher salaries -- often far higher salaries -- than they would otherwise obtain from a free market.
Those who wonder at the hostility of many American academics to any form of capitalism might consider that practitioners of many academic disciplines would be lucky to earn any income from a free market economy. Accordingly, "the free market thinks what I do is worthless. Therefore the free market is evil."
When discussion turns to what every American student should know, these are the folks who cram achievement tests with the obscure and the trivial from their particular subject of interest.
These folks complain that second graders know nothing of Caravaggio. Most of us would settle for second graders able to read and write English.
|posted by Jim on 4:43 PM|
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