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Knowledge of Asia Seen as Vital, bu
- Subject: Knowledge of Asia Seen as Vital, bu
- From: moe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 15 Dec 1999 19:27:00
Subject: Knowledge of Asia Seen as Vital, but Lacking in America
13 December 1999
source:US Dept. Of State
Knowledge of Asia Seen as Vital, but Lacking in America
(Asia Society announces board to improve K-12 Asian studies) (600)
By Nadine Nigel Leavitt
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- Surveys of approximately 2,000 Americans last summer
reveal that 82 percent of adults and 74 percent of college-bound
students agree that knowledge of Asia will be essential to
success in
the coming 21st century -- yet more than 25 percent of those
surveyed
could not even identify the Pacific Ocean as the body of water
separating the United States and Asia.
Two telephone interviews sponsored by the Asia Society of 1,012
college-bound students and 810 adults across the United States in
August and September 1999 revealed that Americans are seriously
undereducated about the Asia-Pacific region. For example, less than
one in four could correctly identify Jakarta as the capital of
Indonesia despite the country's recent heavy presence in the
news, and
almost half of those surveyed said Vietnam was an island. Only 5
percent of the students and 15 percent of adults correctly
identified
India as the world's largest democracy.
"Knowledge about Asia will be very important for tomorrow's
citizens,
who are today's students," John Kelly, Founding President of the
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, said at the Asia
Society December 9 in announcing the establishment of the National
Commission on Asia in the Schools. "And there are problems because
they're not studying it."
"The world has changed a lot since the Second World War, and 25
to 50
years is a relatively short time as school curriculums go," Kelly
added. "And they've just been slow to respond to this major new
priority."
Kelly is the Vice-Chair of The National Commission on Asia in the
Schools, which has been established to strengthen Asian Studies
programs in American elementary and secondary schools by suggesting
improvements in standards, lessons, teacher knowledge, and
textbooks.
The commission is composed of 30 leading education, public
policy, and
business professionals; co-chairs of the commission include North
Carolina Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., and Chang-Lin Tien, former
chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley. The Freeman
Foundation has provided an initial grant of $10 million to
support the
commission and its follow-up activities, which will be led by
the Asia
Society.
"We joke ... about Asia taught through the set of three Fs:
Food, Fun,
Festival," said Namji Kim Steinemann, vice president of the Asia
Society's Education Division and executive director of the National
Commission on Asia in the Schools. She said the commission's goal is
to have U.S. schools "really take into consideration the change that
Asia has undergone, to look at the long history of Asia, and to
get a
real sense of what Asia is today."
Steinemann said a recent Asia Society survey of common U.S.
textbooks
found "there's quite a lot of problem in terms of inaccuracy, in
terms
of data information, whether they are statistics or other types of
figures, to perspectives where Asia appears only in interaction with
the West."
As an example, she said the Asia Society found that one widely used
textbook covers more than 5,000 years of Asian history, including
European imperialism, in less than 55 pages. The same popular
textbook, however, devotes 270 pages to the history of Europe.
The Asia Society is a nonprofit, nonpolitical foundation set up in
1956 by John D. Rockefeller 3rd to build bridges of understanding
between Americans and Asians.
(Distributed by the Office of International Information
Programs, U.S.
Department of State)