Reply to Wilson/College Matriculation?

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Wilson/College Matriculation?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I hope that those "making policy" will know that comparing absolute numbers of people in two populations makes no sense when the population size is so different. Singapore has all of 5.5 million or so in the whole country versus ~320 million in the US.

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Singapore has four official national languages and comes top, or near the top, of the PISA listings for math.

The US has one national language. English.

We got a scholarship to a private.

[/quote]

This post is unintentionally illustrative of the point about diversity.

Unlike most countries, the US has ZERO official languages due to the diversity of languages spoken here.  Dozens of languages are spoken in the US, including indigenous languages in Native American communities and a huge number of immigrant languages, the largest of course being English.  For many non-English world languages, the largest or second largest community of speakers in the world is here rather than in the country of origin.  Speaking of Singapore, we do have larger communities of almost every Singapore language group than Singapore does --- 250K Tamil speakers vs about 170K in Singapore, 3.4 million Chinese speakers (all dialects) versus 1.7 million for all dialects in Singapore.  The only possible exception is Malay, for which I didn't immediately see US data (and which I know nothing about).  [b]This is the kind of American history/culture 101 stuff that's important if you hope to make policy, participate in politics or run an HR department in a city like LA or New York (or Sheboygan Wisconsin, where board meetings for many companies were until recently conducted in German).

The ability to work with data like this and not just confidently spout nonsense about language and ethnicity is an important skill, and one that Wilson students are more likely to have than many others.  But yes, math is important too, and is something that Wilson could do much better[/b].[/quote][/quote]

Um... the PP suggested that the US had one "national language."  The point of this post was that the US has many, many languages and no single "national" language.  [b]We happen to have more speakers of all of Singapore's languages than they do[/b].  We also have millions of Spanish speakers, German speakers, Tagalog speakers, etc.

What was your point, exactly?[/quote]

Just that I hope people making policy know not to use absolute numbers as a basis for conclusions about differently sized populations. I only mention this because the PP referred to making policy and the "ability to work with data and not just confidently spout nonsense about language...". 
I agree with the statement that the US has no official language.

[/quote]

Again not getting the point.  No one talking about comparing different populations, except inasmuch as the previous "national language" poster suggested that the US is homogeneous.  People making policy in cities LA, New York, DC, Minneapolis, or Miami need to understand linguistic and cultural diversity.  This is not difficult to understand.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics