Mandarin Immersion Parents Council

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// ]]>Ask incoming eighth-grader Josh Mussman at Dana Middle School in Hawthorne why he chose to take Mandarin Chinese, and the answer he gives is 100 percent pragmatic: “I had a friend inform me that China is a growing market, and that it would be best professionally to learn it.”

The U.S. Department of Defense agrees. So much so that it is the silent benefactor to a spate of new Mandarin Chinese language courses across Southern California and beyond, including a new summer school program at the Wiseburn elementary school district in Hawthorne.

The program comes at a time when the collapsing state budget has eviscerated free summer school classes. In Wiseburn, the Mandarin Chinese foreign-language class is the last remaining summer school offering.

Meanwhile, across the South Bay, Chinese-language courses are gaining popularity, even as traditional European offerings such as German and French are either extinct or on the wane.

The same holds true across California. This year, for the first time in history, Mandarin Chinese is on pace to surpass German in terms of popularity as a foreign-language course for public K-12 students, according to the California Department of Education.