Obama calls for 1 million U.S. students to learn Chinese by 2020 - EAGnews.org
WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Obama wants to quadruple the number of students learning Chinese in public schools by 2020.
Currently, there’s about 200,000 students learning Mandarin Chinese in U.S. public schools and the president wants to increase that number to 1 million by the end of the decade, the Washington Examiner reports.
...The 1 Million Strong initiative is headed by a group called the 100,000 Strong Foundation, which was first established in November 2009 by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with the goal of sending 100,000 American students to study in China.
...The initial 100,000 Strong program was funded in part through the Chinese government as part of its broader effort to spread its culture around the world.
The government has partnered with American universities and other foreign schools to launch Confucius Institutes to spread its ideas and bring Chinese students to foreign schools.
Those institutes have drawn criticisms from academics for a variety of reasons – from Chinese control over the professors who staff them to concerns about academic freedoms that don’t necessarily jibe with the country’s communist leadership.
But the Chinese government has also launched 357 Confucius Classrooms in American primary and secondary public schools that have also created controversy.
No comments:
Post a Comment