Establishing a Chinese language program in Redmond’s schools sounds exciting and forward looking, but such a program raises educational and financial questions that the school board needs to ponder before it takes the plunge.

America’s incompetence in foreign languages, never a secret, has been painfully obvious in the Iraq War, and the Redmond School Board’s interest in having the community’s schools deal with our nation’s linguistic incompetence is certainly commendable.

A thorough “maternal method” Chinese program established in pre-kindergarten, carried through without interruption to the end of 12th grade, and taught by bilingual native Chinese speakers would offer immense benefits. Not the least of these benefits is that little children taught in this way acquire the foreign language without struggle. Acquiring a very difficult language like Chinese through the virtually “effortless” maternal method would be a great blessing, leading students to easier acquisition of still more foreign languages and to greater academic success in their other subjects. The obvious fly in the ointment is recruiting and retaining a sufficiently large staff of highly competent, dedicated Chinese language teachers.

Over its long history, Chinese has honed its grammar so that it is exceedingly simple, but its sound system of varying tones poses enormous problems for foreign learners. For example, in English the sounds in the word “she” carry the same basic meaning, no matter how we inflect our voice, but in Mandarin the meanings change from “scholar” to “corpse” to “ten” to “arrow,” depending on the tone (inflection) used, and “ma” shifts from “scold” to “mother” to “hemp” to “horse,” according to the tone.

The writing system of approximately 35,000 characters (ideograms) poses equally daunting problems for foreign learners, with reading a children’s book requires a knowledge of 850 characters and reading a newspaper 3,500 characters. In an effort to burnish its increasingly tarnished international image, the Chinese government has embarked on a massive literacy program to educate the illiterate. However, the government has arbitrarily declared literacy to be knowledge of 1,500 characters, not even half of what’s needed to read a newspaper!

With this kind of Chinese government deception added to the flood of other deceptions coming to light recently, the Redmond School Board needs to soberly weigh the consequences of being sucked up by a made-in-China PR campaign through signing on to the offer of teachers on “one-year temporary contracts.”

In America, we tend not to buckle down to serious foreign language learning till children have reached the ripe old age of 12 or 13, when the acquired reflex of their native language battles whatever foreign language they are trying to learn, rather than being willingly open to new languages as the younger children are.

Embarking on a new Chinese language program involves commitments of time and money. The most ambitious program, pre-K through 12, obviously involves the greatest commitments of both but promises the greatest returns. The most tentative program requires the least of both, although the most significant loss might be on the part of students who would expend a portion of their precious time in school on one very difficult language —Chinese — when they could literally acquire four times as much reading, writing and speaking competence in Spanish or French with the same expenditure of time.

The Redmond School Board needs to get beyond any current language faddism and any push from a foreign government to hop onto their PR bandwagon. The board needs to have realistic notions of future as well as current expenditures, present and future possibilities of staffing, and, most of all, what kind of linguistic competence the children under their care can expect to gain from their time in Redmond’s schools.