A prominent Chinese lawmaker, Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference National Committee member Xu Jin, recently came up with a controversial suggestion that it has been a waste of national resources to teach English to all primary and secondary school students. English as a compulsory subject in the gaokao , the university entrance exam, should be scrapped, he said. Having been an English language teacher for more than 36 years, I fully agree with his point of view. For most schools in China, the status of English as a subject should be something like that of French or Spanish in an international school. Pupils learn it simply for the sake of interest. In northern and eastern China, other foreign languages such as Russian, Mongolian, Korean and Japanese have much more practical value. In the southwest, languages such as Vietnamese, Burmese and even some Indian languages may be used more often than English. Why downgrading English to boost China’s cultural confidence is a bad idea One hundred years ago, most Chinese students did not speak English, but in the best universities such as St John’s University in Shanghai , undergraduates could speak impeccable English and had no problem when they wished to further their studies at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale or Princeton. For pre-university students in China today, instead of being forced to learn English in school, like Latin elsewhere, they can simply offload the burden and pick up other more useful skills. For primary and secondary school students, they should be given a choice. If they find Japanese or Korean more interesting than English, why not let them try it out? Khaw Wei Kang, Shenzhen
