Education: A Start in Chinese

The world’s most widely spoken language is taught in only about 30 U.S. high schools, and then often by part-time volunteers hired to teach another subject. Last week at Thayer Academy, a well-ivied prep school near Boston, 39 teenagers began the most ambitious program yet for introducing intensive instruction in Mandarin Chinese to high schools, thereby bringing U.S. language instruction closer to cold war realities.

The students, all of whom will be seniors in nearby schools next fall, will live and work in Thayer’s “Chinese compound” for nine weeks this summer, and will continue to receive four hours of Chinese instruction a week during the coming academic year. Next summer some will attend college language programs in the U.S.; others will spend six weeks at Formosa’s Tunghai University.

Co-godfathers of Thayer Academy’s Institute of Asian Studies are energetic Headmaster Gordon O. Thayer* 52, and Henry Courtenay Fenn, 68, a renowned linguist who retires this month as director of Yale’s prestigious Institute of Far Eastern Languages. Gordon Thayer’s incentive to teach Chinese came from his language problems in another important part of the world. Eastern Europe. Lecturing (with the help of an interpreter) through a cultural exchange program two years ago, Thayer realized how little Americans know of Eastern European language and culture—and how much less they must know about Asia. Back in the U.S., Thayer got a $108,500 grant from the Carnegie Foundation.

While considering the project, Carnegie officials naturally turned to Henry Fenn for advice on testing and curriculum. Fenn responded with the enthusiasm of a man who has fought for years to introduce “remote languages” (e.g., Chinese, Arabic, Swahili) into high schools. The China-born son of American missionaries, Fenn has spent 40 years teaching in the U.S. and China. During World War II Yale drafted him to help establish its “blitz” language program, which crammed U.S. soldiers with conversational Chinese in four months. Many of the high schools that have introduced Chinese have done so under Fenn’s prodding—and most of them use the textbook developed at Yale.

Fenn’s blitz is described by one teacher as “memorize, memorize, memorize. Listen and memorize, say and memorize, see and memorize.”Even the most enthusiastic Thayer student realizes he will eventually sigh: “Wo hen lei [I am very tired]”.

* A distant descendant of Thayer Founder General Sylvanus Thayer, who also founded Dartmouth’s Thayer Engineering School and served as a superintendent of West Point.