There are excellent reasons to offer Mandarin, as an option, in our schools, without the hype and without making it a “critical language”. For much of the last 4,000 years of history about 20% of humanity has been Chinese. Chinese culture has had an important influence on the course of history. The number of schools in the US offering Chinese has grown from 1% to 4% from 1997 to 2008. This is hardly surprising and is, in fact, largely overdue. Mandarin language instruction should be offered, and looked upon from a longer term educational perspective, and not as a sudden reaction to recent Chinese economic growth.