Greetings from Sweden, where the newspapers today report that huge demand for Chinese has now made it one of the top three languages taught in schools here. Sweden has the voucher system, so the curriculum responds to parental demand rather than ministerial diktat. Imagine that. In Britain, just 4,000 of our 3.3 million state pupils study Chinese, and nearly all of them are Chinese. But don’t worry. A government adviser has instructed the country’s 250 specialist language schools to put Chinese on the curriculum as “the language of tomorrow”. Yes, it seems these language schools needed to be told. Moral: you can’t rely on mandarins to learn mandarin.
PS I can recommend Frank Furedi’s brilliant piece on Spiked lampooning Ed Balls’ central planning approach to the curriculum. You can always rely on these former Communists to recognise exactly what Labour is up to.
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