We are careful at the LFNY not to allow digital devices to displace, let alone replace human interaction. Yet access to the internet can be a great support for intelligent conversation, as I experienced laptop in hand a few mornings ago in our 75th Street Lobby. My purpose: to ask our students if they had seen the recent video of Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, addressing an audience at Beijing Tsinghua University in Chinese on the subject of “why you need a strong sense of mission to change the world.” And if they had not yet watched it, to show them a snippet myself:
What do you think, I inquired? Reactions were extremely laudatory, to say the least. Why are you impressed, came my second question. Because we know that learning Mandarin takes effort, was the gist of their answer. From what I have read, Zuckerberg has been at it for five years and this speech is not the first he has given in Mandarin, I added. A year earlier, he had answered questions in Chinese at the same university. Most striking for me, I went on, is the progress people say he has made over the past twelve months, linguistically, but culturally too. He still makes mistakes, but by taking risks, he seems to have made a leap forward, even integrating Chinese proverbs into his arguments, like “If you work at it hard enough, you can grind an iron bar into a needle.”
300 Students Learning Mandarin at the LFNY
What I find interesting, reported one of our middle schoolers, herself a student of Chinese at the Lycée Français de New York since primary school, when our Mandarin program begins, is how Zuckerberg has really connected with his audience, which he could not have done in English, which is important for his business, she noted, but above all for his own education. By being brave enough to make this speech, he will be able to discover so much more about what makes China fascinating. Like you in your Mandarin class, I queried. Yes, she answered, with a very big smile.
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Students learning Mandarin in the Secondary School with teacher Susan Wei.
The exquisite French poet of Chinese origins, Francois Cheng, writes with exceptional clarity about that particularly precious enrichment which results from becoming bilingual in an Indo-European language, in his case French, which he learned as a young man, and Chinese, his mother tongue. In so doing, he sheds light on the experience of the 300 young people studying Mandarin at the LFNY, especially when they continue learning Chinese through 12th Grade. Mastering the French language changed his life forever, enhancing his identity and deepening his sense of humanity. “If Chinese characters suggest things through their written shapes,” he writes, “French words, being phonetic, suggest things through their sounds…The two cultures end up fostering a metamorphosis and a symbiosis.”** May that expansion of self and horizon be true for our students too.
*A variation on Oh, the Places You’ll Go, a classic children’s book by Dr. Seuss.
**Entretiens avec Francois Suri suivi de douze poèmes inédits (Albin Michel, 2015), pp. 30-31.
About the Author :
Sean Lynch was Head of School at the Lycée Français de New York from 2011 to 2018, after having spent 15 years at another French bilingual school outside of Paris: the Lycée International de St. Germain-en-Laye. Holding both French and American nationalities, educated in France (Sciences Po Paris) and the United States (Yale), and as the proud husband of a French-American spouse and father of two French-American daughters, Sean Lynch has spent his entire professional and personal life at the junction between the languages, cultures and educational systems of France and the United States. In addition to being passionate about education, he loves everything related to the mountains, particularly the Parc National du Mercantour.