Critics posting on The Sun Chronicle's blog at thesunchronicle.com were quick this week to share skepticism about Chinese language studies to be offered by North Attleboro High School through a grant from the Chinese government.

But we wonder: What's not to like?

The Chinese will pay for salary for the program and for textbooks, and the school district need only provide a room with a desk for the teacher. Sounds more like a bonus than a boondoggle.

China's Ministry of Education predicted a couple of years ago that 100 million people around the world will be taking Chinese - Mandarin - lessons by 2010. Many people in this country already are, through Confucius Institutes purportedly established to promote the Chinese language and enhance that country's relationships around the world, and through other means.

This is not a new concept that is being adopted by North Attleboro. Many schools and businesses already provide immersion studies. In May 2005, Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, I-Conn., and Lamar Alexander, R- Tennessee, introduced a bill to spend $1.3 billon over five years on Chinese language programs in schools and on cultural exchanges to improve ties between the United States and China. Industry in this country already has ties to the world's most populous country, and these are a mere harbinger of things to come.

The world our children will inherit and reconstitute will be vastly different from the one the Boomers and their parents have experienced. It will be characterized by the explosion of travel, business and educational partnerships with other countries, even those with which we may have political disagreement at this moment.

Film director Steven Spielberg, disturbed by killings in Darfur, quit last month his post as artistic director of the Beijing Summer Olympics, upset by arms shipments to Sudan. Others might back an American boycott of the games.

But things change and the atmosphere that prevails today between the United States and China may be transformed in decades to come. Offering students a chance to better understand through language skills exactly what's going on, can only be of benefit.

"I traveled to more than a dozen schools and I was amazed at how often the English language was being taught to the young people of China," North's Principal Robert Gay told The Sun Chronicle. "There is no question in my mind that the United States and China will be the dominant economic powers in the future. We need to prepare students for the global economy they will be facing."

China is a name that's become synonymous for many critics with repression and, as experience shows us, rightfully so. But that name is also linked to the I Ching, or Book of Changes, to chess, dragon boat races, astronomers, poets, martial arts, scientific treatises, archaeological treasures.

The more our children learn, the more easily they can move through a rapidly changing universe, one in which repulsion and skepticism can be quite quickly be replaced by trade, friendship and collaboration.