Learning Chinese is Hot

04/26/2011

What kind of people do we want to be? As human as we can be, in support of children being as human as they can be.
Ann Pelo and Margie Carter, From Teaching to Thinking

Spanish is still the most popular language taught in schools in the U.S., with over 6 million students. However, the fastest growing language is Mandarin. The number of students taking it — 60,000 — while still small, increased by 195% from 2005 to 2008. Education Week (April 6, 2011) reports that just over 1 million students are studying French; 395,000 German; 205,000 Latin; 73,000 Japanese, and 12,000 Russian.

Two aspects of the report may be seen as concerns. First, in this age of globalization where today's students will likely be engaging with people all over the world as adults, less than one in five U.S. K-12 students are enrolled in foreign-language education, and fewer than one in three in middle and high school levels. Second, most students still take their language instruction in the upper grades, while research suggests that children are more able to learn a second language in their early years.

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