A love of English language teaching is in my DNA. My first job was as an English teacher, to Palestinian schoolchildren. My Grandfather spent fifty years in Nigeria, promoting access to English education. And my father has devoted his life to making it easier and more fun for people to learn English. He lives the Mark Twain line that education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.
The UK and Lebanon are outward looking countries – pioneers, adventurers, poets, dreamers, traders. We are always at our best when we are open to the world and when we engage the world.
And that world is of course changing at a dazzling pace. The generation now at primary school will interact in ways we cannot imagine. But one thing remains constant. For anyone who wants to survive and succeed in the 21st century, the English language is their most important tool. Or to put it in their language (and Niall Fergusson’s), English is the killer app. The language of information. Of education. Of opportunity. The language of the internet, and of globalisation.
So the English skills we are able to give the next generation of Lebanese kids will allow them not just to understand the world. Not just to engage the world, but to shape the world. That’s the Lebanese spirit. That’s the British spirit as well.
By 2015, 2 billion people will be speaking English. And I want that to include an entire generation of Lebanese kids. There are already more conversations in English between people whose second language is English than there are between native speakers of English. I want those conversations to include an entire generation of Lebanese kids.
In eight years, the number of schools here in Lebanon teaching English as a first foreign language is up by 20 per cent; and the number of students enrolled in English up 25 per cent. The Lebanese have always been fleet footed, able to react to changing circumstances. These statistics say that they have seen that English is the future. And the Lebanese should know of course – as our saw in the National Museum and Byblos last week, the Phoenicians helped give us our alphabet in the first place.
The days when London sought to impose our language on the world are over – now the world is demanding our language. The days when countries fought for linguistic space in order to project their power are over – English is now the world’s chosen language, from Silicon Valley to the Shanghai stock exchange to the dynamos of Delhi. Churchill’s great line on nations divided by a common language has been overtaken – we are now nations united by a common language.
And it remains vital that the UK harnesses this energy. We must maintain our support to the English language profession. We must ensure that our immigration procedures, rightly tough, do not push students to study elsewhere. And we must continue to back institutions such as the BBC World Service, which turned eighty last week.
So I am excited to be putting English language promotion at the heart of what the embassy does in Lebanon. I hope that we can chart a course for every Lebanese child to have the opportunity and means to learn English. It’s a realistic ambition. It’s a fire worth lighting.