Topeka ? Education officials Tuesday said the United States, including Kansas, must increase language training, especially in so-called strategic languages such as Chinese, Arabic and Russian.

“The national need is huge and it covers all aspects of our well-being,” said Catherine Ingold, director of the National Foreign Language Center, a research institute of the University of Maryland.

Ingold and numerous Kansas education, business and elected officials met during the Kansas Summit on Strategic Languages, which was at Washburn University.

Economic competition with China and confrontations in the Middle East require more knowledge in the United States of the language and culture of other countries, they said.

“We all know that we have a huge trade deficit with China that in the long term puts us economically at risk,” Ingold said.

Yet, she added, the Chinese “know a lot more about us than we know about them.”

She said the U.S. school system requires less language study than all developed nations and most undeveloped countries.

“We are just very far behind the curve,” she said.

More than 1 billion people speak Mandarin Chinese, yet less than 500 Kansans are taking formal classes in Chinese, according to a task force report on Chinese language training.

“We have so far to go,” said William Tsutsui, executive director of the Confucius Institute at Kansas University.

“Just look at the world around you. Look at the trade Kansas is doing with places like China and Japan. Look at the importance of the Arabic-speaking world to our national security. It’s essential that our kids be able to communicate with foreign people,” he said.

At the public school level, the Shawnee Mission and Olathe districts offer Chinese. Lawrence this year started offering Chinese language courses through KU’s Confucius Institute, which also offers interactive distance learning.

But statewide there are many challenges to overcome in language studies.

Sixty percent of Kansas high schools offer only one world language, and there is a shortage of trained language teachers.

Spanish is the most commonly studied language in the U.S., but Tsutsui said that should change.

“The fact of the matter is where the action of the world is today and where it’s going to be for the coming decade are places like China and the Middle East, and Russia,” he said.

Reggie Robinson, president and chief executive officer of the Kansas Board of Regents, said the board recently has looked at language and study abroad programs at the six regents schools and is considering ways to maximize those efforts.

But Tsutsui said it is still possible in Kansas to get a high school diploma and college degree without taking a foreign language.

“That’s depressing,” he said.