The British Council is arguing that teaching children French in school is a bad idea: what we really need to be doing is teaching them Mandarin. Well, okay, they’re actually arguing that teaching languages is a good thing and we need to step up our efforts. But they’re also saying perhaps we ought to try languages like Mandarin and Spanish in preference to French.
Do they live on some parallel plane of existence? We’ve been trying to teach kids French and other European languages for decades. Are we notably bilingual now? Can the majority of British people fluently speak a language other than English as a result of their schooling? Do we, through our best efforts, close relative location and membership of the EU, happen to have a glut of French, German, Spanish and Italian teachers?
All the answers to these questions are “No”. So, exactly how quickly and how well does the British Council think any attempts to produce fluent Mandarin speakers will pay off? Given that the government only just over a year ago ended the compulsory teaching of foreign languages to all 16 year-olds, exactly how much extra effort is going to be needed anyway?
Plus Mandarin: not the easiest language in the world to pronounce correctly. Going to need a lot of native speakers for this one…