Gillard Government's Asian Century white paper sets an aspiration for Australia to rank as the world's 10th biggest economy by 2025, capitalising on the rapid economic growth in the region.
Contents contributed and discussions participated by Julia Gardiner
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Lateline - 29/10/2012: PMs plan for every child to learn an Asian language - 14 views
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If you understand through the learning of language how people think, how they construct meaning, what is important to them culturally, then I think that gives us better insights into the people that we're going to be working with in the future and negotiating with.
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The Prime Minister says she'll force the curriculum changes by tying them to Commonwealth funding to state and private schools.
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Broadly, teachers and education experts have welcomed the plan, but question where the money is going to come from.
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Currently across all levels of schooling there's around 18 per cent of our young people who are studying one of the four priority Asian languages: Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean. And that diminishes to fewer than 6 per cent by the time they get to Year 12.
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say we simply don't have enough Asian language teachers to deliver the Prime Minister's vision and for the last decade the numbers of graduates have been declining.
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hat's happened because universities have been under these budget constraints and when they've made decisions about what to cut, they cut courses with low enrolments and there goes the languages.
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will help.JULIA GILLARD: We live in an age of different learning possibilities and choices. What we can do through the National Broadband Network, what we can do through having the world's first online national curriculum, which is what the Australian curriculum is, means we can get a deeper penetration of language, literacy and learning.
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we need to be looking very carefully at what sort of encouragement and incentives we can provide to students so they continue doing a language, go on and major in a language in university and then go on to teach in the area.
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