FATHER, SON TEAM UNITE CHINA AND US
Howard Stevenson travels across the United States giving speeches to national educators about Utah’s pioneering, decade-old effort to jointly teach Chinese and English in the state’s public schools.
Stephenson is a Utah state senator and a national spokesman for Chinese language immersion, and the 12,000 Utah students who take Mandarin daily can thank this man for their ability to learn the most important language of the 21st century.
From coast to coast, Stephenson is a sought-after speaker, telling how and why Utah leads the nation in Chinese immersion studies.
But when he reaches the podium to speak, he always honors his son, Daniel.
“Not only has learning Chinese increased his intellect, confidence and employability, but it has increased his compassion and empathy,” said the glowing senator to hundreds last week at the National Language Conference in Salt Lake City.
Those remarkable accolades, heaped on the senator’s youngest son, are repeated at every campaign stop the 35-year elected politician makes toward making bilingual, Chinese-English education a national priority.
In her 1989 blockbuster book and Hollywood movie “The Joy Luck Club,” Amy Tan predicted that only three languages will be spoken on Earth in the future: Spanish, English and Chinese.
Since Tan’s blockbuster, Spanglish has gotten a permanent American foothold, China’s economic and geo-political influence has skyrocketed, and the latter two tongues have emerged as the unquestionable global language links of the future.
Next week Stephenson will speak in Philadelphia to the National Security Education Board, its six presidential appointments, and its board of high-level Department of Defense officials.
Now considered an American educational heavyweight, Stephenson’s son remains the same, whether it’s repeated to American liberal educators in Wisconsin or DOD brass in Washington: Get on board the China Express.
Now! And at each stop on the American education circuit, Dan’s story is the cause
Dan Stephenson is a living proof of why every public school student in America should be studying Chinese, the elder Stephenson says of his youngest child.
Dan Stephenson was as naive as his father about China and Chinese culture when the duo crossed the Pacific for the first time in 2000.
His conservative dad, newly elected to