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Mon | October 09, 2006

College Board AP World Languages Program

AP Central - AP Chinese Language and Culture Course Home Page

AP Chinese will be offered for the first time this fall. Their current offerings (French, Spanish, German and Latin) are euro-centric, and AP Chinese is part of the World Languages initiative to offer a greater diversity of languages (namely Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian).

It seems like a step in the right direction, but from my second-degree impressions of the program, I'm not sure how much is really getting done. The College Board got a lot of money from the Chinese government in support of the program (in fact I think it's entirely funded by them) and yet I don't really see it happening. My mom is one of the most qualified people who went to their workshops and she's closer than anyone to actually being a high school Chinese teacher, and yet she isn't starting a new job anytime soon.

Also, it's kind of annoying how far Hanban, the Office of Chinese Language Council International of the Ministry of Education in China, is willing to bend over backwards for the College Board. Their latest offering is Chinese teachers who will work for free. That's right, free. So it costs the American school nothing, Hanban gives this teacher from China a stipend (i.e., next to nothing), and a Chinese person drops everything to go teach Chinese to ungrateful American children (yet another infuriating immigrant story).

The problem is that Americans don't get enough grief for being the monolingual assholes they are. If they were treated like idiots for only knowing English, then they'd feel more obligated to change. At a certain point, languages did become cool (or maybe they always were) but they're still treated as a novelty, as something rare and cool, instead of requisite.

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