Global city fails to hear other languages
I am writing in response to G. Dudley's letter titled 'Race discrimination guaranteed in diploma' (Education Post, January 6). I cannot agree with the author. The Education and Manpower Bureau's assurances for the provision of support in Chinese for minorities and immigrants are short-sighted and hypocritical.
In learning a foreign language, students' perceptions of language and their view of the world are challenged and widened.
As an international city, Hong Kong's young people should be allowed, like their peers elsewhere, to excel in learning other languages. However, the EMB deems this to be outside the bounds of its resources or consideration. At most it can offer support to help students cope with Chinese.
The diploma guarantees not only discrimination, but practically forces students to be resigned to a fate of educational inferiority, mediocrity, or, worse, failure. It is hypocritical for liberal studies to be made compulsory in the hope that it will help our students become global citizens when a valuable tool such as foreign language learning gets thrown out like the baby with the bathwater.
Not only should French be retained as an acceptable alternative to Chinese, language examinations should also be expanded to include languages such as German, Korean and Japanese. And these should all be considered as acceptable language qualifications in place of Chinese, particularly for those who have not had the benefit of years of education in Chinese.