Are You Smarter than Zuckerberg?
The one thing that popped out at me while watching the video of Mark Zuckerberg’s introduction of his home AI, which he shared last year on his wall, was not the innovative nature of the product — Amazon and Google already have a version of that . It was that the billionaire founder of Facebook makes his daughter, Max, listen to Mandarin lessons as soon as she wakes up every day.
Zuck’s wife, Priscilla Chan, is ethnically Chinese, born in the US to immigrant Chinese parents. She speaks Spanish, Cantonese, and English fluently, so the child-rearing habit seems logical on the surface. Zuck himself was raised Jewish, but he has also learnt Mandarin, notably as his yearly challenge for 2010. But they both speak English as a first language, and sit on a “metaphysical empire” which Facebook actively sustains through the use of English as the default language of the product around the world. Why would they want their child to learn and speak Mandarin?
That wasn’t a serious question. It is one unlikely to be asked by anyone with half a brain because we know that children are better served by being exposed to their native languages. And in this case, it is likely that Priscilla and Zuck consider Mandarin as much a first language to their child as English. We also know that humans generally thrive better, cognitively, if they speak more than one language, among other benefits. So even though Facebook doesn’t yet exist in China, its founder has already leapt many steps ahead, immersing himself in the culture through a more genial and personal means.
Max will grow up empowered to belong in at least two different worlds. If she goes on to study languages like her mother, she would have added a third one. And if she then learns to code, as she is likely to do, that is a fourth. Add a musical instrument and you have a fifth language within one individual. How many layers and possibilities of life experiences would that have built into the child by the time she’s ready to take on the world? Even at the early stages of life, how much more sophisticated is this child being set up to become among other children of her age, especially in a way that is as understated as the knowledge of — and competence in — a second (or third) language?
I live in Nigeria, where the suggestion that the knowledge of a local language (even the first language of the child) is an asset is met with notable scorn. Our middle-class idea of a good education is a child in front of cable television watching Nickelodeon early on Saturday morning. I have an acquaintance who has sworn never to expose his children to Yorùbá because “it is a backward language with no commercial or educational value”, missing the point totally about the purpose of a multilingual education. When scouting for schools, we are happy when “French” or “Spanish” is offered as elective courses. But when they are not, and “Igbo” and “Yorùbá” are mentioned as alternatives, we move away fast, accepting that this is not the right school for the child we are trying to raise.
But the purpose of teaching children in a familiar language is reinforcement. Zuck and Priscilla are, certainly, well-to-do enough to have their child learn French or Spanish or German as a co-first language with English. But they chose Mandarin because (1.) it is a language that both of them speak, and in which they are able to offer feedback and reinforcement during the learning process (2.) because it is a language with some historical and cultural relevance to the child and her future. It is the only other language other than English in which Max can get adequate support in her natural environment during her developmental stages. (Edit: A number of people have pointed out that there is a 3rd and important reason, namely, that the future prospect of Mandarin as a world-dominating language makes it equally fitting. I agree, except that in this case it would be a really wide stretch to assume that Mark had this planned all along: to marry a Chinese woman just so that he can dominate the world).
For Nigerians, that language is Igbo or Yorùbá, or Edo, or Hausa, or Ibibio, or Fulfude, etc. And yet, in Nigeria, they are the languages that our educational systems have least supported over the last couple of years. Do not wonder then why the new generation are not as innovative, and complex, and dynamic as they should otherwise be. Wọlé Ṣóyínká, Africa’s first Nobel Laureate — who won the prize for his plays and poems written in the most evocative (and yes, dynamic) English prose — said that the first books he read as a child were in Yorùbá, until he was about six when he began school. Then English entered his vocabulary. Many of the world’s greatest writers in English have a similar story: a different language at home and through childhood, and then English. In the process of understanding the world through the lens of two (or more) different languages and culture, a sophistication grows, the mind is sharpened and — seeming counter-intuitively— both languages develop a resilience that is otherwise unattainable by a deliberate avoidance of one.
I have seen it within Nigeria too: a Berom child in Jos whose first language has been subsumed under Hausa for so long grows up learning both, and then eventually English in school. Edo and Delta children typically grow up speaking, along with their mother tongue, some form of Igbo or Yorùbá. In other South-Southern communities where smaller languages live side-by-side larger and more viable ones, a diglossic situation allows them to grow up learning both, and then English, until they are adults with an innate ability to blend within different worlds and bring out a more nuanced appreciation of the world in the process.
Maybe, in that, the major languages of Nigeria lose out as a result of their enormity, because it is with the children from these advantageous language and ethnic groups, with no compulsion to learn their own languages or those of their neighbours, that monolingualism has arisen as a middle-class disease. And they don’t speak English well either. Go read them on twitter. And even when they do, no matter how much of an English monolingual life you set up for them, when any child from Nigeria (upper or lower class) applies to foreign universities, they still have to first take the test of English as a foreign language!
And so, I return to the title of this piece, directed at my over-privileged colleagues many to whom technology is everything and the Facebook founder is a god, but to whom bilingual education in the child’s first language (or the thought of it) is a scary and demeaning proposition: Are you smarter than Mark Zuckerberg?
