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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.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday August 11 2020, @05:07PM
"Chinese" as the name of the language is a misapprehension by non-Chinese. Foreigners think "Chinese" is a monolithic language and ethnic group. They don't know that term comprises many dialects, as you pointed out, when what they mostly mean is Mandarin; they don't know the term comprises many ethnicities, when what they mostly mean is Han. But "dialect" is even a tricky term here because while the written form of the language is the same, the spoken forms are mutually unintelligible.
Washington DC delenda est.