Lowy: Should it all be Chinese to us?

The Lowy Institute's blog The Interpreter had a good post by Scheherazade Rogers on the dangers of too narrow a definition of priority Asian languages and too limited funding plus the importance for students of a wider and deeper understanding of Australia's place in our region.

Budget 08-09: $62.4 million to a National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program

Here is the relevant section of the 2008-09 Budget commitment of $62.4 million to a National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program (NALSSP). Scroll about halfway down to the section titled 'Strengthening regional connections'.

David Hill: AUSTRALIA’S 2020 ASIA VISION

From the Asian Studies Association of Australia's Asian Currents:

by David T. Hill, Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, Murdoch University

With the dust now settled on the Australia 2020 Summit, the question remains ‘what next?’

As a participant in the stream on Australia’s future prosperity and security, I was aware of the extraordinarily challenging task our group faced in trying to distil our multitude of conclusions into final form.

We focussed on some confronting issues: terrorism, security treaties, trade pacts, global warming, and migration flows. But running through almost all was the central need for Australia to be able to communicate and cooperate with the countries of our Asian region.

Whether discussing preventative security, sustainability policy or Australia’s economic future in 2020 when 43 per cent of the global GDP will be generated in Asia, one thing was clear. Until our society becomes Asia literate – that is, informed about, able to communicate with, and relate to, Asia – we will be struggling with one hand tied behind our back.

The report handed to the PM in the final session included our stream’s three ambitions for 2020, two of which related directly to Asia. These were the call to ‘reinvigorate and deepen our engagement with Asia and the Pacific’ and to ‘ensure that the major languages and cultures of our region are no longer foreign to Australians but are familiar and mainstreamed into Australian society’.

The priority was for a comprehensive, cross-agency, national strategic plan for a major reinvigoration of Asia literacy in Australia, to enhance our global engagement in trade, security and people to people exchanges.

The report recommended a more focussed effort to recruit foreign language teachers from local communities and overseas, and to enhance Australia’s foreign language teaching skills.

There was a strong appeal to the spirit of adventure of young Australians, to encourage them in their thousands to link with Asian communities through support for school twinning, exchange programs, mentoring, in-country and community-based learning programs. In drafting the consensus we dubbed it ‘Australia’s 2020 Asia vision’.

I was exhilarated to hear that the previous weekend’s Youth Summit had also called for a ‘national linguistic and cultural platform’ which would ‘enforce mandatory learning of foreign languages in secondary schools and assist businesses with linguistics retraining’.

Since participants were constantly urged to go for ‘big ideas’ we lacked sufficient time to fill in the details.

We talked, for example, about the importance of getting young Australians to study in Asia as part of their education, but left open the precise mechanisms. We exhorted the government to encourage students to study Asian languages at university and mentioned a ‘language bonus’ in the university entrance score and a HECS waiver for languages, but did not have the time to consider other possible stimuli. We recognised the dearth of qualified teachers of Asian languages but did not explore how best to train those required expeditiously.

So there’s much left to do to turn the goals into implementable strategies.

But if the government incorporates Australia’s 2020 Asia Vision into our education system, the prosperous and secure future we glimpsed at the Summit may be ours, and more importantly, our children’s.

Links:

• The Summit website http://www.australia2020.gov.au
  
  
• The Youth Communiqué http://www.australia2020.gov.au/youth/index.cfm#communique