• By Chuang
  Sheng-rong 莊勝榮

A few organizations and professionals in the field of education say that bilingual education has no legal basis, jeopardizes the normal development of education and would lead to excessive study of English. One wonders whether they know anything about how things work in other nations.

Considering how many Europeans know two or three languages, has anyone in those nations called for a halt? Does anyone say that it harms the normal development of education?

Surely not.

Those doubters should have a look beyond our shores before talking about bilingual policy. Besides, who said that every policy must have a legal basis? Do policies about encouraging childbirth, raising salaries or artificial intelligence need their own legal clauses before they can go into effect? Anyone who thinks that way would get left far behind.

To do the right thing, officials need to have vision. Former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew (李光耀) made English Singapore’s principal national language. That policy has made Singapore what it is today. If Singaporeans could only speak Chinese, would more than 1,000 foreign companies have set up offices in Singapore?

If people in Taiwan could speak English as well as Chinese, there would be no language barrier for overseas investors coming to Taiwan, or for foreigners to visit Taiwan as tourists or come here to study. Similarly, Taiwanese would face no language barrier when traveling, studying and investing overseas.

One of the main draws for Taiwanese businesspeople to invest in China is that there is no language barrier. Now, with many such companies shifting to Southeast Asia, they need to learn the local language or employ locals, but they also need to use the international language, namely English.

The government wants to make English our second official language. If we stick to this bilingual policy for two or three decades, it would turn Taiwan into a cosmopolitan nation, so why not go ahead?

It is strange to see so-called experts opposing such a well-intentioned government policy.

Island nations’ lack of immediate neighbors tends to make them closed-minded, and this is true of Taiwan and Japan. Japanese have never been very good at English, but if they could wake up, they could also adopt a Japanese-English bilingual policy.

The government has already seen the light and set about promoting bilingual policies. Strange, then, that some people whose children go abroad to study English, science and technology are against the bilingual policy here in Taiwan. Are they afraid that other people’s children will get so good at English that they compete with their own children?

There are up to 2 billion English speakers in the world. How could it not be a good thing to converse with all those people, learn about their cultures and customs, and do business with them?

More than 60 percent of Germans and more than 70 percent of Finns can speak English. English is Denmark’s third language, and the second language of Norway and Sweden.

Compared with the European vigorous promotion of English-language policies, Taiwan is several decades behind, but we still have some people who stubbornly cling to localist and isolationist ideas while opposing the bilingual policy. Our government should widely publicize the advantages and necessity of bilingualism.

Thankfully, this is one thing that the three presidential candidates largely agree about. This consensus is in line with mainstream public opinion, so the government should forge ahead with its bilingual policy.

Chuang Sheng-rong is a lawyer.

Translated by Julian Clegg