Some Georgia Schools Make Mandarin Mandatory
9th September 2012
I guess the theory is that when their jobs are shipped to China they can follow along. Or something.
Public schools in Macon, Ga., and surrounding Bibb County have a lot of problems. Most of the 25,000 students are poor enough to qualify for free and reduced lunch, and about half don’t graduate.
Welcome to Black-Run America. Be careful not to step in the diversity.
Bibb County’s Haitian-born superintendent Romain Dallemand came into the job last year with a bag of changes he calls “The Macon Miracle.” There are now longer schools days, year-round instruction, and one mandate nobody saw coming: Mandarin Chinese for every student, pre-K through 12th grade.
Trying to teach the kids standard English rather than Ebonics is obviously doomed to failure, so lets invest in some trendy foreign language. What’s Mandarin for ‘We be toys ‘n’ shit’?
“Students who are in elementary school today, by 2050 they’ll be at the pinnacle of their career,” Dallemand says. “They will live in a world where China and India will have 50 percent of the world GDP. They will live in a world where, if they cannot function successfully in the Asian culture, they will pay a heavy price.”
And yet they’re making no attempt to teach Hindi, which is the other half of this ‘Asian equation’. Perhaps that’s because Indians are pushing their kids to learn English, which is the default international language of business. But Hindi isn’t as hip and trendy as Mandarin, so it gets ignored; which, in turn, reveals this ploy for what it is: A way to make parents and politicians feel good about themselves while not doing anything effective about training these abused kids for a productive life. And so we end up with FIREFLY, a world in which everyone can speak English and Chinese while living hand-to-mouth. My, what an improvement.
“Bibb County is not known for producing the highest-achieving graduates,” says Macon resident Dina McDonald. “You’ll see that many of them can’t even speak basic English.”
McDonald herself has a ninth-grader in the public schools and says she can imagine some students going into fields where Mandarin could be useful, like international business, technology or law. But with lower achievers, she says, “Do you want to teach them how to say, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ in Mandarin?”
Oh, God forbid that the parents might be consulted in all of this. We’re from the government, and we have a better idea.
“While we do know that Mandarin is a critical language, another critical language here in the United States is Spanish,” Eric Spears says.
Bibb high schools will continue to offer Spanish and French on top of Mandarin, but for most of the elementary kids, it’s Chinese or nothing. Considering the Hispanic population doubled in Georgia over the last census period, the “Why not Spanish?” question is one Dallemand gets a lot.
“My wife is a Latina, and so I fully understand,” he says. But “it is important for communities to educate our children for their future, not our past.”
For that future, Dallemand says, there is no choice but Mandarin Chinese.
And ‘no choice’ is what the Crust is all about.