Newsweek Special on Global Education

There is a special report on Global Education in the Newsweek International issue dated 20.08 - 27.08.
In chapter three of the report there is particularly interesting article, 'Even in China English is King', comparing the number of non-native speakers learning Mandarin around the world with the number of non-native speakers learning English around the world. According to the article although many people around the world are learning Mandarin Chinese it will be sometime before the dominance of English as a global language or lingua franca is challenged by Mandarin.
This appears to be mainly because of the growing worldwide trend in non English speaking countries toward introducing English language teaching at the Primary school level.
The 'comments' at the bottom of this article are interesting as are the other articles in this special edition.