Language - and the " Asian Century " !

Many Australians now in their seventies will be bemused by the plan to make learning an Asian language compulsory in all schools.   In their day, learning French and German was the requirement - and few ever made any use of it once their school days were over.

This is a very different age.   This is the age of travel and the vast majority of Australians can expect to have visited another country before their thirtieth birthday.   The business world will see trade opportunities emerge as Asia becomes this century's powerhouse and for those with communication skills - the world will be their oyster.

Along with career choice, selecting the language to learn will become a decision each student must make early in their schooling.    The choice will be Mandarin, Hindi, Indonesian or Japanese.   It will not be an easy choice, because it is not clear which Asian economy will be supreme a decade or so from now.

At the moment, China seems triumphant, but the Chinese one child policy is creating a fast ageing population and rising pay levels may see the same downturn that crippled past economic leader - Japan - to a strange level of  " stagflation ".    India is emerging as the next manufacturing hub and it has the advantage that it's former colonial status has elevated English as a language spoken by many of it's people.

Indonesia is an enigma.   It has a huge, undeveloped potential - and it is right on our doorstep.  There is no doubt that as it creates a new middle class we will see an expansive opportunity to provide services.  It is unlikely that Australian children will learn more than one Asian language.  It seems that the age of specialization will be upon us at an early age.

Ushering in language skills to compete in the Asian century is a daunting task.   Just finding people who speak those languages will not be sufficient.  We need people with the teaching skills to make them interesting. - and challenging enough to hold pupil interest.   Handled badly, this could easily degenerate into a classical failure that simply wasted a lot of money for no result.

Our whole school system needs to be dragged into the twenty-first century because it is fragmented and inefficient.   We still have a different set of standards set by each of the six states and two territories, and we can't even decide on a common " compulsory reading " book list.    Each school system has it's own curriculum - and the efforts to set a common standard have so far failed miserably.

It will be a disaster if each state system is allowed to interpret how this language initiative is to work.  We live in an age when families frequently change states because of work opportunities, and consequently kids move from one school system to another.  As things stand, they are disadvantaged by vastly differing systems - and what education badly needs - is uniformity.

Unless we can solve that problem - learning an Asian language is likely to be just another failed good idea !