The Foreign Service Institute of the US state department says it takes a native English speaker roughly 2,200 hours to become proficient in Mandarin. To learn Spanish – or French, or any number of other nontonal languages that use the Roman alphabet – the FSI estimates it takes roughly 600 hours. I may be wrong about this, and am happy to be proved so, but my hunch is that my children will never be proficient in Mandarin, in spite of the New York public school system’s vague belief to the contrary.

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I say vague, because Mandarin is on the syllabus for many three- and four-year-olds starting school this September, but it is not mandatory across the system. Instead, it is an optional extra, and our local elementary school has opted in, with one hour a week of Mandarin tuition scheduled for the incoming class. It is abundantly clear why they have done it. The school, which has historically served a low-income demographic and was recently rezoned in an effort to better integrate the neighbourhood, is trying to attract middle-class families and offering Mandarin is seen as one surefire way to do it. Even the posh private schools, those institutions on the east side of Manhattan where 50% go on to Ivy League universities, are anxious enough about marketing to have started shoving Mandarin classes on to their kindergarten schedules. (French, not as fashionable as it once was, is now commonly introduced only in fifth grade.)

When the PTA meets, everyone is always on about Mandarin. It is unclear where the enthusiasm came from

And at one level, of course, it is lovely. How ambitious and internationalist to introduce a second language from the get-go, and one with its roots so far from English. Even an hour a week spent on the subject of Chinese culture and language might usefully expand a four-year-old’s references. It is also, surely, a bad life lesson to teach kids not to do something because it is hard.

And yet, given the school landscape in New York, it still strikes me as faintly absurd. Our elementary school has low proficiency levels in maths and English. It has inadequate resources, almost zero fundraising capabilities, and a large minority of children who have Spanish as a first language (as does 18% of the city). And yet when the PTA meets, everyone is always on about Mandarin. It is unclear where the enthusiasm came from, other than some vague sense of emerging “Asian markets” and the fact that it’s fancier than French. And I am probably suffering from a snobbish resistance to a subject promoted on the basis not of culture but trade. (It doesn’t help that Ivanka Trump’s six-year-old daughter, Arabella, performs a Mandarin folksong as her party piece, a video of which charmed the Chinese government at a state dinner last year.)

But while there are worse ways for a bunch of four-year-olds to spend Friday afternoon than learning how to draw Chinese characters, it seems an odd priority in a depleted education system that can’t guarantee the lessons will carry on higher up the school. Instead, it has that faddy and slightly desperate air of the person who wants to show they are worldly by getting a tattoo earnestly misspelt in Sanskrit.

• Emma Brockes is a New York-based feature writer for the Guardian