Coquitlam's Confucius Institute - a reply to the School District

Re: “Confucius complaints, but not here” (Friday October 24, Tri-Cities NOW)[1]

The Editor:

I am disappointed by assistant superintendent Patricia Garland’s comments on SD 43’s partnership with the Confucius Institute.  Her words that the Institute is “completely under the control of the educational institution” are misleading.

In fact the children in the “public school” Mandarin classes are being taught by hand-picked teachers from China.  These teachers are trained to self-censor on topics such as Tiananmen Square (erased from public memory), Tibet, Taiwan, and the Cultural Revolution.

 

Moreover SD 43’s partnership with the Confucius Institute is not a benign link with some Ministry of Education.  Rather, all Institutes are directly connected to the Beijing Politburo, the main policy-making body of the Chinese Communist Party. No wonder why the Association of Canadian Universities is urging a break with the Confucius Institute.

The heart of the matter is academic freedom, or the possible lack thereof.  As the Mandarin bilingual program grows from elementary to middle (and possibly to high school), the need for academic freedom grows more and more acute.

Patricia Garland also goes on to say that “there could be misconceptions around a lack of information,” inferring that complainants (who don’t exist here) might not be well informed.  Being seasoned, I like to call a spade a spade: China has an authoritarian government which is deaf to human rights.  The single-party government that controls China today is the inheritor of Mao’s revered rule, which, aside from doing everything to obliterate Confucius at the time, was also responsible for the deaths of some 40-70 million persons – who are not talked about.

Furthermore, precisely because we are a multi-cultural society, our “public” educational system – and indeed SD 43 – needs to be independent of undue influences.  The Chinese government has climbed to great heights here merely by greasing the pole.  The cash flow from Chinese students subsidizing education budgets here is another feature of our dependence on the Confucius Institute.

Finally, I would like to add that a major goal of an education is to teach critical thinking.  It appears Patricia Garland gets a failing grade here.  It’s a problem of mandarins dealing with mandarins.

Joerge Dyrkton

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[1]This letter was published in the Tri-Cities NOW on Friday October 31, 2014.  See also Frank Ching, “Why some are reconsidering the wisdom of Confucius”, Globe and Mail, Wednesday October 1, 2014, p. A13.  For a broader background, see Joshua Kurlantzick, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.