Mandarin Immersion?

Thanks to Premier Christy Clark’s non-adhesion to two decisions by the B.C. Supreme Court, the Coquitlam District school board has cut millions of dollars from this year’s budget and millions again from last year’s budget.  The impact on the school system is huge, and deleterious: increased class sizes, no job security for teachers with 10 years’ experience, Special Education Assistants are spread thinner and thinner, librarians are gone, no cafeterias in Middle Schools, and buses slashed (adding to greenhouse gases).

But has anyone at the School Board thought about cutting Mandarin Immersion from the public purse? As a Canadian I find Mandarin Immersion in Coquitlam rather odd.  Once the dialect of northern China, Mandarin is now the official language of the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan, where everyone is expected to speak it.  Mandarin is also the native language of maybe 250,000 immigrants spread across Canada today, approximately 30,000 of whom are of Taiwanese origin. In 2011 Statistics Canada reported 94,000 Mandarin-speaking individuals in B.C., or 2.2% of the population, so that is hardly enough to justify public immersion classes in Coquitlam.

Yes, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to “instruction in minority language educational facilities provided out of public funds”.  But the Charter implies that only minority language parents have rights for their own children “where numbers warrant”.  Are we talking about “minority language educational rights,” as per the Constitution, or are we talking about opportunity for instruction in an “official” language that is neither English nor French?  I suspect the latter.

Because the number of Mandarin-speaking immigrants has not reached any sort of ‘critical mass’, we can see that the decision to bring about these immersion classes was based on factors not protected by the Constitution. Most students in these immersion classes likely come from outside of Mandarin-speaking immigrant families, yet the public is footing the bill for nearly exclusive, other-Chinese or Asian communities to learn Mandarin as a second, or possibly third language. The decision to have Canadian taxpayers fund Mandarin immersion in British Columbia takes a block of parents off the hook for funding the education of their own offspring, aided as they are by the Confucius Institute, which quietly peddles China’s soft power.

But wait!  China is going to be the premier world economic superpower, I hear, which is the real reason behind Mandarin Immersion.  We need to understand language and culture better in order to do business with the Chinese state and economy, which wields greater and greater influence. The philosopher Karl Popper, in his classic The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) describes this kind of argument politely as moral futurism because it “takes sides with the powers that will be, with the rulers of tomorrow”.  One finds many moral futurists in different parts of Canada who do not realize that their logic tends to undermine what it means to be Canadian.

Yes, language is important, so is cultural heritage, and immigration. And the ability to speak a number of languages fluently is admirable and pressingly urgent, but the case for Mandarin Immersion violates the spirit of the Canadian Charter while at the public’s expense.  Given the scarcity of resources in Coquitlam’s school district, perhaps it’s time to give Mandarin Immersion a serious re-think.