Sacramento public schools are about to offer "Chinese immersion," instruction in Chinese from day 1, in Kindergarten, at its Elder Creek Elementary School. Next year two more Sacramento schools will offer "Chinese immersion." It is a modeled on a successful program in San Francisco.
When I started school - (no hints when) - schools were named for Presidents, we had rabbits and one choice for language of instruction. A foreign language was for high school.
But times change. Ask Mark Pinto, Applied Materials CTO who started his young children on Chinese and then took them and his company's solar R&D manufacturing center to Xi'an, China. And we all know that young children pick up languages with ease while most of us struggle. [age 3-11 is the best time.]
Though the Sacramento program starts with about 80% Chinese (the rest English), it slowly starts to shift toward 50-50 Chinese-English by the 6th grade. It is not a choice of somehow choosing one language over the other; children can learn both.
The community around Elder Creek is has a large number of immigrants: Vietnamese, Hmong, Chinese, Russian, Hispanic. The school aims for about half the students in the 'Chinese Immersion' program to be native Chinese speakers and half native English.
The school hopes to form a relationship with a school in Beijing.
In China, a school offering free instruction in 2 languages would soon have parents from the entire province surround it. [Chinese don't like to queue.] Multilingual education is really something new here; I wish I had it.
The Sacramento program is also about globalization in the best sense. When I first went to China, I met a young New Zealand couple who were sending their daughter to a regular Chinese school. The little girl was like any other happy, well-adjusted child - and a world citizen. When I asked the blond-haired, blue-eyed lady where was her home, she thought for a moment, smiled and said, "China." It meant she had one foot firmly in each culture (Chinese/New Zealand) and was already light-years ahead of me.
But again, there is a joke in China. "What is the English word for someone who can speak 3 languages? Trilingual. And 2 languages? Bilingual. And the English word for someone who only speaks one? American."
[More information about the Chinese Immersion Program: call the school principal Mary DeSplinter, 916-277-5978, during working hours. School has good popcorn, too.]
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