Forget Chinese, get maths right

Fear of China is making Americans so nervous that some of them have stopped thinking rationally.

At least that's the impression I draw from the whole craze in the United States about learning Chinese.

AP reported that the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee is considering a proposal to allocate US$1.3 billion to public schools for teaching Chinese language and culture.

The story cited a survey in which 2400 US high schools said they would consider teaching Mandarin. Only 240 opted for Italian and 175 Japanese.

"Chinese is a language we, as a nation, can no longer afford to ignore," a delegation of US business and education leaders said this month in its report after touring China.

The group, noting that US schools have fewer than 50,000 students learning Mandarin while more than 110 million Chinese are learning English in China, recommended ramping up "national capacity" so that 5 per cent of US high-school students are studying Chinese by 2015.

It's important to remember that even if the most-populous nation fulfils Goldman Sachs' prophecy and overtakes the US as the world's largest economy by 2050, the average Chinese will still be earning less than half as much as the average American, British, Japanese, French, German or Canadian citizen.

The (mostly rural) Chinese students who are growing up without English will urbanise and become the next generation of factory workers, making cars, electronics and everything else the US will consume.

They won't be the world's buyer of last resort. No one will make an extra effort to speak their tongue. This reality was perhaps best captured in a maxim that author Donald DePalma attributes to former German Chancellor Willy Brandt: "If I am selling to you, I speak your language. If I am buying, dann muessen Sie Deutsch sprechen."

Roughly translated, If I'm buying from you, you speak my language.

China will embrace English on its own terms.

Writing in the journal English Today in April 2004, Hu Xiao Qiong makes a compelling case for native English speakers to accept "China English", a communication tool she says is as good as standard English.

Hu gives an example of China English: "You must go to his son's wedding dinner. You must give him face." In most Asian societies, face is equated with honour, whereas standard English insists that only "to lose face" is idiomatically correct.

The English language is what economists call a "network" good, something that gains in value with more usage.

As English becomes the norm for commerce - and eventually superior courts - in China, the business-unfriendly Chinese legal system will start converging towards English common law practised in Hong Kong.

The US can find many other uses for the US$1.3 billion the Senate committee wants for Mandarin education. One priority may be to train math teachers to calculate the value of 1 3/4 divided by a half.

Researcher Ma Liping describes that particular problem.

More than half of US math teachers to whom Ma had given the problem got the computation all wrong. Not only did all the teachers in China get the answer right, 90 per cent came up with a valid "story" to explain the solution to children so they got the correct figure of 3 1/2.

In 2004, Alan Greenspan, talked about math education being a threat to US competitiveness.

A story about the chartered financial analyst exams last week said Chinese students had the highest pass rate in the world in last month's CFA Level I test, followed by Germany and India. The US was fourth.

Some US kindergarten kids are learning that a triangle is "San-Jiao' in Mandarin, says AP. They might learn something more useful by playing with an abacus.

Doing the math
* Chinese students topped world in CFA math test.
* They were followed by Germany and India.
* The US was fourth.

- BLOOMBERG