I used to think that Disney was in the cartoon, kids’ shows, lunch box, back pack, sweatshirt, mouse ears, Happy Meal, stuffed animal, plastic toy, and other merchandising business. Little did I know they’re in the education biz, too, where they’re “building thinkers everyday.”
I can just picture the Seven Dwarfs heading off to work – heigh-ho, heigh ho – to the now off-shored factory where they build thinkers.
Of course, I should have known that Disney was all over education. The Wonderful World of Color (which we watched in black and white in our house) often had science-y stuff on it - shows like Perry the Flying Squirrel and The Blue Men of Morocco. Personally, I preferred to watch episodes of Annette, although I did like it when old Walt gave us a dose of history – like Swamp Fox or Johnny Tremain.
But I hadn’t realized that Disney is also in the for-profit, classroom business. At least in China, where they run after school specials: evening English language classes for kids as young as two. (Source: The Economist.)
Thousands of Chinese children have signed up for Disney’s schools since the first one was opened in October 2008.
That should probably read “thousands of Chinese children have been signed up.” As enticing as Nemo, Mulan, and Cruella deVille are, I can’t see many kids signing themselves up for classes. But i digress.
Tuition is $1,800 a year: a big sum in China. But Disney claims that its results are impressive. It has ten schools in Shanghai, five in Beijing and plans to double that number in the next year, slowly extending from China’s two largest cities to surrounding areas. The main constraint is not customers—the older schools already have waiting lists—but training and staff.
This, of course, tells us a couple of things that we already know.
One, English is the world’s lingua franca. The real Esperanto.
This is lucky for us, since the, when it comes to speaking (if not writing and reading) English, we do have a teeny-tiny bit of a leg up on much of the rest of the world. Maybe not enough to give us much by way of competitive advantage, but it’s still something.
It also tells us that driven parents – and that would seem to include a lot of Asian parents – want their kids to learn.
This is not so lucky for us. Sure, there are lots of pockets of striving, driven parents out there, pushing their kids – or at least mildly encouraging them - to do well in school.
But one only has to read about the kids coming out of high schools with skills that are far too puny to translate into much career-wise to know that a lot of folks have bought into the idea that “We’re Number One” exceptionalism should entitle each and every one of us to a middle-class living. Even if we can’t locate our own state on a map, believe that World War II was waged between Russia and the Confederacy, accept as true to notion that photographic evidence exists that proves that man rode dinosaurs, and need an iPhone calculator to figure out that change for a $5 bill used to purchase something that costs $4.75 is a quarter. (That’s the round, silvery coin that used to always have George Washington - or whoever that dude with the pigtail is - on one side of it, and some type of bird on the other. Now it’s still got the dude with pigtail, but instead of the bird, it’s got a lot of boring stuff about states – whatever they are – on the other side. Like, man, what’s a peach got to do with Georgia?)
Anyway, one of the reasons behind Disney’s getting into the education biz in China is to make money in an area where they don’t have to look out so much for protecting their IP:
The very complexity of education means that it is less vulnerable to the piracy that usually stops Western media firms from making money in China. A bootleg copy of “Mulan” is much cheaper than the real thing and possibly just as good, other than the fact that it is stolen. It is harder to fake a good education.
Not to mention that there’s a lot of money in it. English-language education in China is big business. It’s:
… growing by 12% annually and will reach $3.7 billion by 2012. That may be too modest. Adele Mao, an analyst at OLP Global, a research and consulting firm, reckons the market is already nearly $6 billion a year and is growing by 20%.
Plus, the bottom line being the bottom line, it won’t hurt the fortunes of Shanghai Disney World to have all those kids who know and love Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy and the whole
And who goes home from Disney-ville empty handed? All those made in China stuffed animals, bibelots, mouse ears… This will be one hell of an aha moment, won’t it, when folks realize who and what all the branded, useless junk they’ve been producing is actually for.
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