It won’t be happening instantly, but one of the many news items to come out of President Cavaco Silva’s recent state visit to China is that Portuguese state schools are keen to offer Mandarin Chinese as a language option.
Accompanying Silva throughout the week-long tour, Education Minister Nuno Crato called the decision “big news”.
“This agreement opens new perspectives of cooperation between the two states,” he told journalists on the last leg of the tour.
“There is also a great interest in China to learn Portuguese right now, especially among young people,” he added. “This interest will develop.”
“Mandarin could be integrated into the education curriculum of Portuguese schools as an option, and the Confucius Institute (the equivalent of Portugal’s Camões Institute) is willing to cooperate,” he said.
The whole issue of language was pivotal to last week’s visit, with Cavaco Silva pushing the Portuguese language and talking to students at Peking’s University of Foreign Studies.
As to a time-frame, Crato is thinking “between three and five years” before Mandarin makes it onto secondary schools’ lists of language options – but as Público newspaper, reporting the story, points out, a number of state and public schools are already offering Chinese. In Madeira, for instance, Mandarin is already being taught to primary school children.
And last week The Resident reported on the Vilamoura International School’s plans to introduce Chinese lessons as an extra-curricular activity in the next academic year.
