Watch out! Here comes the hoards of Red!
(photo pinched from the Net)

Here’s a story that is sure to stir up some muck in our swell little town … article shared below, courtesy of the Vancouver Sun and the Vancouver Courier newspapers:

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Mandarin bilingual program contributes to balkanized Canadian identity

Vision trustee admits money major motivation for unprecedented school district initiative

By Mark Hasiuk,
Vancouver Courier

January 26, 2010

Thanks to a unanimous school board vote last week, beginning next September, entire classrooms of students will receive half their education in Chinese–Mandarin, to be exact.

The board’s decision to support the Early Start Mandarin Bilingual Program represents a dramatic change in language instruction in Vancouver public schools.

Participating schools, program costs and curriculum details are pending, but here are the broad strokes: classroom instruction, which includes all regular curriculum courses, will be split evenly between Mandarin and English. During the first year of operation, the program will exist only in kindergarten and Grade 1 but will grow with the students (adding an additional grade every year) to eventually operate at all grade levels. Some students may remain in the program for their entire public school career.

It’s like French immersion, but in Mandarin–for half the classroom time.

“We’re really excited,” says Susan Duffy, spokesperson for Parents for Mandarin in B.C. “We’re definitely heading in the right direction.”

Duffy should be excited.

Parents for Mandarin in B.C., an advocacy organization of roughly 10 hardcore members, is largely responsible for next fall’s program launch. For more than two years the group lobbied the school board and rallied support among the Chinese-Canadian community. According to Duffy, a proud adoptive mother of two young girls from China, roughly 185 families (representing 250 kids) are interested in the program. Most of the families are of Chinese ancestry.

Any parent activist bent on altering public school curriculum should study Duffy’s strategy, which spawned an unprecedented new language program at yet-to-be-determined costs during a budget crunch in a school district struggling to provide basic necessities such as school supplies.

But forget about the money, for a moment.

What about the cultural consequences associated with granting Mandarin de facto officialdom in the classroom, to compete with English and French in our nebulous and teetering Canadian culture?

“It’s a language of the future,” argues Vision Vancouver school board trustee Mike Lombardi, liaison to the district’s Modern Languages Committee. “Just look at the composition of our population and the growth of China in the world economy.”

Right. But considering India’s growing economic and cultural profile on the world stage, that same argument can be made by parents who speak Punjabi–the language most used by families of Indian descent in Metro Vancouver.

Due to the unprecedented nature of K-12 Mandarin bilingualism in Vancouver schools, we can only speculate whether or not the program will contribute to the balkanization that exists in school hallways and neighbourhoods around the city. But language is an integral component of culture, and kids flock to their own kind.

Past school boards evidently shared this concern.

Jamieson elementary has offered a Grade 4-7 Mandarin bilingual program for more than 15 years, but according to the school board website, the program accepts only students “with little or no prior knowledge of Mandarin.” This caveat prevents immigrant children with poor English skills from entering the program, and Jamieson’s late elementary grade levels guarantee several years of round-the-clock English before students go bilingual.

Conversely, the new K-12 Mandarin program trumpeted by Duffy and Lombardi welcomes all students, no matter their language background. While Lombardi claims the program is “not designed for students who’ve already got acquisition of the language,” it’s bound to attract students who speak some Mandarin at home.

Unlike French immersion, which introduces the language to non-French speakers, this program will–in many cases–teach kids what they already know and may stunt the English development of students already accustomed to a bilingual environment.

The benefits of multilingualism are undeniable. Many languages should be taught in Vancouver public schools, and they are, including several Mandarin courses beginning in Grade 8. But English, outside of Quebec, bonds Canadians of all races and ethnicity. Kindergarten kids in Vancouver should be steeped in English only, for their sake and the sake of their community. It’s worked pretty well, so far. Chinese-Canadians are among Vancouver’s chief architects, enriching our city and helping make it Canada’s greatest place to live.

Considering these realities, and the threadbare budget of the Vancouver school district, why introduce Mandarin bilingualism? Why now?

Back to the money.

The program, says Lombardi, will attract parents to the school district, increase enrolment numbers and snag more provincial dollars for district coffers. “We think it’s a good recruiting tool,” he says, “which could bring us more funding.”

Despite high-minded rhetoric, the Early Start Mandarin Bilingual Program is mainly about money–a language everyone understands.

mhasiuk@vancourier.com  www.markhasiuk.com