China studies

To understand why the Bangor school system was right to enthusiastically join an unusual partnership with a Massachusetts-based China studies group, just look at the complex and subtle relationships the United States is encountering and creating in its pursuit of the Sept. 11 terrorists. Knowing what is going on around the world and understanding the reasons for these events has never been more important. And China – its people, culture and economy – is certain to become even more influential in the coming years.

Ryan Bradeen, a social-studies teacher at Bangor High School, has been offering an Asian studies course for several years, but his work with the partnership with Primary Source of Watertown, Mass., provides the opportunity for a far broader, K-12 examination of China, beginning with teacher training and course work in three grades. Primary Source provides seminars, field study, local instruction and most of the funding for the project through grants from the Freeman Foundation. Mr. Bradeen currently is putting together a calendar and curriculum to get the project in place by next year.

One way to look at how globally important China, with its 1.2 billion people, will be in the coming years is to consider a passage from Thomas Friedman’s 1999 book, “The Lexus and the Olive Tree.” Mr. Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote, “In twenty years, China may be an economic and military powerhouse capable of rivaling the United States – but it is not going to get there in a straight line. Some 40 percent of the Chinese economy today is still made up of state-owned industries and banks, many of them bankrupt and unproductive. The only way China can take care of the millions of Chinese who work for the firms is by privatizing them, closing and merging the weak ones, and directing capital to the efficient and profitable ones. And the only way China can do this without massive unemployment is with a massive influx of foreign investment.”

Attached to massive foreign investment, including or especially from the United States, will be a massive level of interest in how well that investment works. China is fascinating culturally, but the world will pay attention to it because it is among the largest and fastest growing markets and because political freedoms there have not followed economic ones, suggesting that the absent straight line referred to by Mr. Friedman is, in fact, likely a tortuous path. Maine – for that matter, Bangor – will be part of this global future just as surely as a century ago it was an essential part of the lumber trade to Asia.

The question for local educators is how well their students will be prepared for this future. The partnership to bring China studies to Bangor is a good sign, a sign that students here will have the opportunity to understand something crucial about the world.