Okay, background: for a long, long time, I’ve strongly supported the idea that learning Mandarin will be an extremely valuable cultural and economic advantage in the 21st century. If I had my druthers, it’d replace French in public school curriculum. Anyways. Earlier today a ‘facebook friend’ of mine who I knew back in high school posted an article about a school that’s teaching grade schoolers Arabic. Another ‘facebook friend’ from high school responded and, well, lost his everlovin’ mind and declared that I was a “frothing racist” based on the exchange that I’ve copied and pasted below.
I’d like to debate the substance of my general claim (e.g. it’s better to learn Mandarin than Arabic) and, I suppose, if anybody can coherently argue for why my position is racist, have at it. This was the exchange:
So, what say you, Dopers? Is it racist to suggest that students should learn Mandarin instead of Arabic? Is it correct that our children would see greater rewards from learning Mandarin than Arabic?
You’re not disagreeing on the value of the languages. You’re disagreeing on the purpose of language education. Not racist at all. I lived in the ME for 5 years and I’m very sensitive to Muslim/Arabic values, and I know perhaps a dozen words in Arabic. Less, if you don’t count those which are Urdu cognates.
You’re right that it’s silly of him/her to call you a racist for saying that literally the most widely spoken language on Earth may be of more practical benefit to future students, and the rhetoric they use (the “since you’re a teacher” and general anti-business sentiments are particularly classic) smacks of some serious hard-left naivete. Also the way they left the argument was a major human being fail.
I still can’t get over that rationale… how can an educator honestly believe that they have a responsibility not to prepare their students for the business world?
No, Mandarin has the most speakers. But almost all of them live in China. The most widely spoken language is English, and Arabic is a near runner-up. Both are languages of wider communication even among people who speak different languages at home. (In Arabic’s case, every Muslim has to know some like every Jew has to know some Hebrew – it’s considered sacreligious even to translate the Koran, you have to study it in Arabic or not at all.)
I figured as much, but it’s good to get some confirmation. I’ve taught ESL and I’ve studied linguistics and cognitive linguistics, and nothing I’ve ever seen has said that language instruction in and or itself is necessary or even necessarily desirable for increasing cultural respect and understanding.
Yeah it was… odd. I suppose he’s tacked hard to the left and gone past the lunatic fringe and now resides happily in crazytopia. I mean, hell, of course my job as an educator is to prepare my students for the world they’ll face as adults. In my professional opinion, that includes everything from marketable skills to a strong work ethic to sharp critical thinking skills. The idea that taking responsibility for providing students with quality life-paths is somehow not at teacher’s job is… odd.
Yah, that’s my thinking, we’d leave our children with a more valuable skill set if they’re fluent in Mandarin than Arabic. And yes, my first impression was that he was on drugs or something of the sort, especially when he PM’d me to tell me how I was being a “frothing racist”.
Isn’t the question really Him’s assertion that “don’t you find it obvious that the choice is about overcoming cultural antipathies & not equipping grade-schoolers to succeed at business?”
Your counter-argument that learning other languages does not produce positive views of other cultures is narrowly focused. I doubt anyone would recommend an introduction to representatives of a culture and then say “But don’t learn the language!”
So, I don’t think your view is racist, as a matter of fact Him’s point is racist by calling the cumulative speakers of particular languages ‘races’. But your argument must be qualified in that it is based on a business oriented view of the question. Also based on today’s short term business oriented view of the world. The future value of Arabic both for simple direct business application and the more indirect aspects of global diplomacy may be far more valuable than a knowledge of Mandarin in the not too distant future. And in addition, many people may be finding that knowledge more valuable today.
Ironically, the language most considered the valuable to learn every where in the world except France, is English.
True, it was pretty narrowly focused. As far as I’m concerned, foreign language classes should primarily be to learn a foreign language and not social engineering. Should a school decide that they want to teach students about a foreign culture, cool, but rather than taking up a language slot, social studies is actually built for learning about other nations’ cultures. But as I see it, that’s a pedagogical point and not a racial point.
Well, on that note, I think while Arabic may possibly be of more benefit diplomatically in the future, I think that Mandarin will almost certainly be of greater utility in global business. And, I suppose, the fraction of students who will enter the diplomatic corps is much smaller than those who will end up interacting with the global economy.
I laughed at the statement: “the purpose of public schooling is not to prepare 10-year-olds for the future climate of world business. since you’re a teacher, I hope you understand that.”
Preparing students to be financially viable may not be the exclusive function of the educational system but it’s certainly a significant part of it. Languages can play an important role in this endeavor.
Beyond that the next sentence was just disturbing: our country is horrifically racist against arabs (& other folks mistaken for arabs). for instance, we kill arabs all the time, in our country & in their many countries. it’s normal for people in america to be completely ignorant about arab culture & islam.
Really? did you ask this person to site that we’re killing “arabs” all the time in our country or that we’re horrifically racist against arabs in any sense of the word in our society? Does this person not understand that arabic is spoken independent of culture or religion in the areas of the world that speak it?
I should’ve followed up but I was Facebooking somewhat absentmindedly and not in full debate mode. I guess he does think that we’re butchering Arabs here or something.
I’m from Pakistan and I know dozens of pious Muslims who can recite lots of the Quran but couldn’t follow the simplest conversation in Arabic. When Muslims from Pakistan, Tanzania and Indonesia get together, the converse in English. Meanwhile the business sectors in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia are dominated by Chinese speakers. We outsource our higher level tech support to a Malaysian outfit that is a unit of an Indian firm. The place is largely run in Chinese. Except when they are talking to us in the US or Europe. Then they speak English.
Regardless of China’s future economic prospects, I would be very surprised if westerners learning to speak and read Mandarin, with its several thousand characters and tone-based word meanings, would ever be more widespread or feasible than Chinese learning to speak and read English.
In other words, Mandarin just isn’t a very good basis for a lingua franca.
The value of learning the Koran in Arabic is that it was revealed to the prophet in Arabic, and as with any translation, the original and authentic meaning can fall short and differ somewhat. In my experience, the five daily prayers sound beautiful and melodious in Arabic, but the quality of the sound and feel change with English. Abdulla Yusef Ali or M. Pickthall have good English translations of the Koran, and I am not aware of sacrilege in studying Koran in English.
Also, on Mandarin v. Arabic, one (rather large) advantage I see for Mandarin is that it’s possible to learn a language that a bunch of people actually speak. With Arabic, one typically learns “Modern Standard Arabic” (I may have the exact wording here wrong a little), which is something like the King’s English. You might be understood in some Arabic countries speaking MSA and you might not. “Arabic” really encompasses a number of different dialects that are each almost different enough to be different languages.
(And I’m waiting for some linguistics nerd to come slap me down over some minor particular of the above, but I think I got the general idea correct.)
On the other hand, I suppose that one advantage of Arabic over Mandarin is that it is easier to learn to read Arabic.
Agree with most of the OP, but this is rather premature:
China currently has about half the GDP of the US nominal. In terms of PPP it’s waaay down the list; about the same as Jamaica.
The challenges the country faces now are very different to the challenges involved in getting to where it is. Japan has already tread a similar path only to then suffer a “lost decade” and ruinous public finances.
So it’s far too early to talk about the US being overtaken, let alone the US not being a credible rival. And I’m saying that as a non-american with no dog in the fight.
I doubt this. First, we need not look to far into the past when people were saying the same about learning Japanese (or Russian). Even though China will most assuredly become the biggest economy in the near-ish future, the Chinese are learning English faster than non-native speakers are learning Mandarin. A quarter of Chinese study English. I don’t think that tend will change even in the medium-term future.
Second, Chinese is very hard. U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute quotes 2,200 hours as the minimum number of class hours required for attaining fluency in Mandarin. If you took 10 hours a week of classes, it would take 4.5 years. And that doesn’t include the fact that you will likely need to immerse yourself in the culture to truly become fluent. Also note that doesn’t include learning to read or write.
That raises the next question, how many non-Chinese will ever live or interact with large numbers of Chinese speakers in the future? I certainly cannot imagine Chinese allowing much immigration given the current population, and I don’t envision Chinese becoming the lingua franca of business, science, or commerce to a point in which the average person would have to speak to a native speaker very often. The Chinese don’t really export culture on the same level that English-speaking countries do, so even if you are a dedicated student, there are few places you will encounter the language.
I disagree. Even though French is less widely spoken, studying the language is very useful to most English speakers because they will likely use what they learn more often. Not only would they be more likely to see French in everyday society, but they will likely become a more eloquent English speaker given the language’s similar roots.
I don’t know where the truth lies wrt to your racism, but if I were to hazard a guess, his claim that you are racist is probably based on more than just that exchange.
Well, I think this is a pretty myopic and ethnocentric statement. The Arab world brought us Algebra, among a number of other things. To focus on just the few countries that are oil rich is kinda distorted.
The overwhelming majority of students who learn a language in the US will never become well-versed enough to speak it, nor will they travel enough to utilize it on a regular basis. I can’t see your site, but even if learning a language doesn’t make you like the speakers more (I doubt that), it does affect you in many other positive ways.
I think that is done a great deal in most language classes I have been in.
The same is true for nearly every Asian country as well.
You could say the same about China’s rapidly approaching demographic crisis. Regardless, I think the error in your reasoning is that you think you can predict what will be of value 20 years from now based on current trends. Many of the jobs people will get when the graduate from college didn’t exist when TPTB were determining their curriculum. The course China is on now is not much different than they one Jan was on 25 or so years ago. How economically valuable is speaking Japanese nowadays?
If anything, language is not going to represent a big value added in the future seeing how language is far less of a communication barrier with modern technology. So, you would be better off learning languages for education’s sake.
True, it does involve a significant amount of prognostication, but as guesses go, that China will continue on to become a major global powerhouse isn’t in much debate these days, I don’t think.
China will be what might be called a “second-rate powerhouse” for a while–simply because of its great population–but the country is going to grow old before it grows rich. The one-child policy is an absolute disaster in demographic terms.
There’s a tool called a “population pyramid” which is a graph of a country’s population broken down into numbers of males and females by 5-year age groups.
China has more English speakers than any country in the world. English instruction is now included from primary school oneward (though the teaching force is only now becoming truly prepared for this) and all college students regardless of major must pass basic English tests to graduate. You can find people who don’t speak English (hell, you can find people who don’t really speak Chinese- Chinese being a mishmash of languages and dialects) among the older populations, in out-of-the-way places and in some of the more corrupt state-owned-enterprises manned by old military cronies. But any given city is brimming with perfectly good English speakers. I mean, lots of my college students in a rural third-tier teaching college were studying for the US GRE exam- and passing it with great scores.
In other words, every company doing global business is going to have plenty of English speakers on staff to do business with you. There will be nothing you can do in Chinese that could not be done just as well in English. And if by some random bizarre circumstance you end up working with an organization with no English speakers, there are literally millions of interpreters who will gladly interpret at all of your meetings for the cost of your morning latte. China is full of millions who are hoping to eek out a living with their English skills, and they all work cheaper than you do.
What Mandarin is good for is:
Telling the taxi driver were to go
Ordering off menus
Chitchatting with the market ladies
Party tricks at business dinners- a well-placed Chinese phrase is always good for a laugh
Picking up people at bars
And in the major cities, not even that. Unless you plan to actually live and conduct daily in a somewhat off-the-beaten-path city actually in China, your Mandarin probably confers no real value at all.
French, on the other hand, has job offers flying off the shelf for me. People literally circle it on my resume and cover it with exclaimation points. Part of it is my field, but part of it is that Sub Saharan Africa is booming, and the French speakers there don’t speak English. Anyone who wants to conduct business in Francophone West and Central Africa will be working primarily in French, and key business and government connections are probably going to be French-only. US French speakers are rare enough that they will have their pick of jobs in the region.