U.S. Students Need More Math, Not Mandarin: Andy Mukherjee
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&sid=axwRzTXAcHf0&refer=columnist_mukherjee
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/23/bloomberg/sxmuk.php
U.S. Students Need More Math, Not Mandarin: Andy Mukherjee
Jan. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Fear of China is making Americans so nervous that some of them have stopped thinking rationally.
At least that's the impression I draw from the whole craze in the U.S. about learning Chinese.
The Associated Press this month reported that the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee is considering a proposal to allocate $1.3 billion to public schools for teaching Chinese language and culture.
The AP story cited a survey in which 2,400 U.S. high schools said they would consider teaching Mandarin. Only 240 opted for Italian and 175 chose Japanese.
``Chinese is a language we, as a nation, can no longer afford to ignore,'' a delegation of U.S. business and education leaders said this month in its report after touring China.
The group, noting that U.S. schools have fewer than 50,000 students learning Mandarin while more than 110 million Chinese are learning English in China, recommended ramping up ``national capacity'' so that 5 percent of U.S. high-school students are studying Chinese by 2015.
It's no doubt valuable to learn Mandarin, or any other language, for cultural enrichment. If, however, the language is to be drilled into one in 20 high-school students, hard economic costs and benefits must be considered alongside the intangibles.
Let's ask experts to put a value on the resources that will be required to meet the goal of putting 5 percent of U.S. school students in Chinese-language classes by 2015 both in terms of teaching expenses and the opportunity cost of the pupils' time.
Let's also ask educators what could possibly be gained from this investment when 110 million Chinese students, who will comprise the bulk of China's urban middle-class earners and consumers from 2015 onwards, are already learning English.
Brandt Rule
It's important to remember that even if the most-populous nation fulfils Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s prophecy and overtakes the U.S. as the world's largest economy by 2050, the average Chinese will still be earning less than half as much as the average American, British, Japanese, French, German or Canadian citizen.
The (mostly rural) Chinese students who are growing up without any teaching of English at all would urbanize and become the next generation of factory workers, making cars, electronics and everything else that America will consume.
They won't be the world's buyer of last resort. No one will make an extra effort to speak their tongue. This reality was perhaps best captured in a maxim that author Donald DePalma attributes to former German Chancellor Willy Brandt: ``If I am selling to you, I speak your language. If I am buying, dann muessen Sie Deutsch sprechen.''
Roughly translated, If I'm buying from you, you speak my language.
`Give Him Face'
China will embrace English on its own terms.
Writing in the journal English Today in April 2004, Hu Xiao Qiong makes a compelling case for native English speakers to accept ``China English,'' a communication tool she says is as good as standard English, into the fraternity.
Hu gives an example of China English: ``You must go to his son's wedding dinner. You must give him face.'' In most Asian societies, face is equated with honor, whereas standard English insists that only ``to lose face'' is idiomatically correct. Hu's point is that if the Irish can gain admittance into the inner circle of English speakers in just 50 years with their own unique idiom, the Chinese should also be made to feel welcome.
Language of Law
The English language is what economists call a ``network'' good, something that gains in value with more widespread usage. Rule of law is its most beneficial ``network externality.''
As English becomes the norm for commerce -- and eventually superior courts -- in China, the business-unfriendly Chinese legal system will start converging toward English common law practiced in Hong Kong. When that happens, U.S. companies and banks in China will be rewarded handsomely.
``The common law system in which the law is continually reinterpreted by judges ends up protecting property rights far more than others and makes it easier to enforce restrictive covenants,'' Columbia University economist Frederic Mishkin said in a recent paper on financial globalization.
The U.S. can find many other uses for the $1.3 billion the Senate committee wants to allocate for Mandarin education. One priority may be to train math teachers to calculate the value of 1 3/4 divided by a half.
Researcher Ma Liping describes that particular problem in her 1999 book ``Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics.''
More than half of U.S. math teachers to whom Ma had given the problem got the computation all wrong. Not only did all the teachers in China get the answer right, 90 percent came up with a valid ``story'' to explain the solution to children so they got the correct figure of 3 1/2.
Math, Not Mandarin
In 2004, Alan Greenspan, talked about math education's being a threat to U.S. competitiveness in a Senate Banking Committee hearing. The Federal Reserve chairman's concerns were validated in a Bloomberg News article last week about the Chartered Financial Analyst exams.
Chinese students, the article said, had the highest pass rate in the world in last month's CFA Level I test, followed by Germany and India. The U.S. was fourth.
Kindergarten students in Portland, Oregon, are learning that a triangle is ``San-Jiao' in Mandarin, according to the Associated Press. They might learn something more useful by playing with an abacus.
Last Updated: January 22, 2006 17:08 EST
