Recently, I went for a seminar about the Harriet educational group which gave a talk on how we can make lots of money by becoming a consultant with them. Although the purpose of me attending the seminar was just to know on how to make big bucks, the seminar had indeed given me a lot of valuable information regarding the education market. As you all know, the education market is currently booming. From the statistics that I got from the seminar, there are like billions, even trillions of people from various countries(mostly from asian countries) who are frantically trying to get their hands on good quality education. This can be seen from an article from The Straits Times on the 11th feb 08, which talks about how South Korea is trying to revamp their english education system to ensure that more of its people would be able to at least converse in english. It was quoted that “South korea ranked the lowest among 12 countries in east asia for communication in english in a 2003 report made by the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy”. According to the article, the improvement made in conversational english is still minimal. Globalisation has made it impossibly hard for us to neglect the english language. As such, the language is being used almost everywhere in the world. Because of this phenomenon, people are encouraged to learn the english language mainly for the benefits that it can bring about which, according to the article again, includes getting a decent high paying job. But I do disagree to a small extent about what Mr Lee Myung Bak, the new president of SK, said. He claimed that countries that uses english tend to gain economically as compared to those who don’t. But what about countries like Japan and China? According to Tim’s takamatsu-English Education in Japan webpage, the Japanese kids are only “learning a unique form of English only known in Japan”. This shows that their grasp of the english language is not that great but their country still emerge as one of the top economic giants. Of course, I’m not trying to put down the importance of the english language but i’m merely trying to show some instances in which the english language might not play such a big role in a country’s economy. But of course, most countries do succeed because they gave a lot of importance on the english language. Singapore is one such example. With the ability to read, write and converse in english, one would have access to knowledge by well established countries such as America, the United Kingdom and more whose main language is english. From there, we would be able to improve our own country using that knowledge.
Anyone out there agree or disagree with me? All of you are welcome to comment on what i’ve written… stay tuned!
