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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the intelligence!=wisdom dept.

The Conversation:

The love of all things English begins at a young age in non-English-speaking countries, promoted by pop culture, Hollywood movies, fast-food brands, sports events and TV shows.

Later, with English skills and international education qualifications from high school, the path is laid to prestigious international universities in the English-speaking world and employment opportunities at home and abroad.

But those opportunities aren't distributed equally across socioeconomic groups. Global education in English is largely reserved for middle-class students.

This is creating a divide between those inside the global English proficiency ecosystem and those relegated to parts of the education system where such opportunities don't exist.

[...] It's unfortunate so many schools view an English-speaking model as the gold standard and overlook their own local or regional wisdoms. We need to remember that encouraging young people to join a privileged English-speaking élite educated in foreign universities is only one of many possible educational options.


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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:35PM (2 children)

    by Immerman (3985) on Tuesday August 11 2020, @03:35PM (#1034960)

    Not really, just a logical extrapolation of current social trends. And he wasn't the first. Once you step outside the blinders of American Exceptionalism you realize that native Mandarin speakers have us outnumbered almost 3 to 1, and China is very rapidly catching up with us in terms of political, economic, technological and industrial power.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:58PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2020, @04:58PM (#1035013)

    Language, culture, mindhsare - these are part of soft power that Chinese don't hold. China doesn't have any soft power. Japan does! Even korea does. India does, but not in English world.

    To have soft power you need a certain amount of artistic freedom of expression that simply doesn't exist in China.

    There is no time in next 50 years when non-Chinese people are going to learn Mandarin. Chinese are learning English [wikipedia.org] on the other hand. Imagine that - people who seem to have bought half of Australia are learning English.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @04:43AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @04:43AM (#1035396)

      People are learning Mandarin, but definitely not on a large scale. The language is just too complicated and of too limited a use for people to need to learn. Most people learning Mandarin are doing so because they're curious about the culture or they want to do business in China. Thanks to the writing system that the language is effectively chained to for all time, it's unlikely that any significant number of people will learn in the future. The loss of so many of their vowel sounds over time has led to a situation where trying to write the language without the characters is incredibly hard to do. They've only got about 1600 identifiable syllables to work with even after accounting for the tones. Without the tones they have fewer than 500. By contrast English has somewhere around 11 or 12 thousand uniquely identifiable syllables making it incredibly easy to use an alphabet with minimal confusion between words. It also makes it easier to change the words, grammar and word order without rendering the sentence gibberish.