China will soon be the most powerful economy in the world. To survive, Top People will have to speak the language. On your bike, Mum. Find a suitable tutor and take up your child’s only remaining free evening in the week.
Head teachers like me are feeling the pressure to supply more Mandarin lessons rather than pedestrian French and German. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, wants every secondary school pupil to have the right to learn Mandarin alongside the 231 other things the Government has decided it’s essential for children to grasp this week.
Everyone needs to calm down. Mandarin shows all the signs of being the educational equivalent of swine flu: genuinely important but, so far, massively hyped. The truth about Mandarin is surprisingly complex. I have to declare an interest. On one of the first educational exchanges with mainland China several years ago with two Manchester schools, we were urged to learn some simple phrases. The well-meaning leader of the team put in a year’s work. In his speech to the local welcoming committee he thought that he was saying thank you, but appeared instead to have compared the senior local dignitary to something rather unpleasant associated with a pig. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
BACKGROUND
Mandarin will stretch our children
Labour: primaries to teach Arabic and Mandarin
Teenagers have better things to learn than Mandarin
Mandarin - no easy option
Mandarin is fiendishly difficult. Many schools have horrendous drop-out rates. The real danger is that we burn children’s fingers and put them off not just Mandarin but languages in general, when a more gentle immersion might have let them stand the heat in the kitchen.
A kinder way to introduce Mandarin might be not to make it compulsory, but to have it as a club in school, sweetening the pill of a demanding language by talking about Chinese culture, food and history. We don’t just need to speak to the Chinese: we need to understand them.
Mandarin is different from other languages. The conventional skills that enable children to pick up French or German don’t help. Those who take to it best aren’t linguists, but musicians. Our system likes to compartmentalise subjects, and few schools have a crossover between music and Mandarin. Yet it might prove the richest source of recruitment. There is also a very practical objection to GCSE Mandarin. Whether head teachers, parents and pupils like it or not, A* grades are increasingly influential in deciding whether a candidate gets an offer at a UK “Ivy League” university. The lion’s share of A*s in Mandarin will inevitably go to native speakers. Any universities adviser meeting a clever child who hasn’t heard Mandarin spoken round the table would feel nervous about suggesting it as a GCSE. However hard non-native speakers try, they will find it hard to excel.
Two university tutors have told me that they would prefer students to start Mandarin at university. They argue that there is a shortage of good teachers of Mandarin in Britain, and that too many students who learnt it at school have been taught badly. They also believed that the challenge of the new language was better handled by someone that bit older.
A Chinese saying (it would be, wouldn’t it?) states that we always educate children for the world we lived in, not the one they will live in. It is absolutely right to recognise that our young people will benefit greatly from more knowledge of another language. With Mandarin the issue is not whether we do it, but how.
Another suggestion is to develop an alternative qualification. Let native speakers colonise the GCSE. The Government could pioneer a series of diplomas, like piano grades, in Chinese studies that would mix language with culture and history.
Teaching of formal Mandarin could be postponed until the sixth form, when students are mature enough to cope, and sign up for it because they want to — not because their parents or the Secretary of State think that it’s a good idea.
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