The Editor,
Re. “Int’l students bolster the SD43 budget” (front page, The Tri-City News, June 10).
School District 43 superintendent Patricia Gartland’s glowing assessment of SD43’s international education program should be taken with a grain of salt.
The top source for students appears to be China and these students take a long time — a number of years, if not more — to gain English proficiency. The school system must be awfully easy if these students have a 76% average upon arrival, a number that seems to have been pulled out of a hat to satisfy the uncritical reader.
As well these students have a pronounced tendency to mingle among themselves (as one would imagine). Also, because of language and social difficulties, they are not prone to volunteering, as Ms. Gartland states, and they are not inclined to make their own clubs, as she suggests.
Moreover, the centrepiece to Ms. Gartland’s international education program is the Confucius Institute, a known extension of Chinese “soft power.” It’s because of the Confucius Institute that we have so many Chinese students in the international program. Without it, there would be few.
In other words, Chinese students come to Coquitlam because SD43 has been approved by their authoritarian state — a dubious honour — and this fact will not change merely because of so-called “attractive” educational changes here in B.C.
Meanwhile, virtually on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, while in Canada, berated a Canadian journalist for asking our foreign affairs minister, Stéphane Dion, about human rights abuses of Canadians in China. Apparently, the Chinese official does not value our freedom of the press and he differs rather widely in his concept of what
it means to be “responsible.”
Let’s hope that SD43 does not compromise its educational mission — and the Canadian way — in the continuing rush to bring overseas money into the school system.
Joerge Dyrkton, Anmore
