I just finished reading one third of a children's edition of the Three Character Classic in Chinese, published in three volumes. I promised my dad that I'd learn it after we bought some bamboo scroll art that had this ancient document carved onto it. Aside from that, it really is and important thing for anyone interested in ancient China to read. Inside the Three Character Classic, or San Zi Jing (三字經), are a thousand years of history, culture and thought. I recommend it to anyone interested in China Studies because it teaches so much. I think this must be why kids in Taiwan today are still made to memorize it by the age of 10.
In my search for a good edition of this ancient treatise on Confucian ethics, I've learned some things about contemporary Taiwan as well. For instance, kids books on ancient China published in recent years are mostly garbage. I have read a couple of different children's editions of a historical novel called Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and while the older one hardly skipped over one character or event from the history, the newer one was more like a Cliff's Notes version where tons of important character development and events were glossed over in a few pages just to get on to whatever parts the author or publisher found to be the juiciest.
One new edition of the San Zi Jing that I bought was even worse. The parts about Confucian ethics and family relationships had mostly been edited out and the author had even added to it, making it useless for a beginning student of ancient Chinese like myself. I knew I was reading the wrong book when, towards the end, there was a part about The Chinese Nationalist Party coming to Taiwan. I should have known when it mentioned the Ming and Qing dynasties (the San Zi Jing was written before these two dynastic cycles). Honestly, the people who publish a lot of books for kids in Taiwan seem to care more about drawing wacky manga renditions of historical figures than actually telling the history.
But what does this mean? Is education on the decline in Taiwan? You wouldn't know it from the effort most parents put into educating their children, but it seems like there's a slight shift in the current curriculum away from the old style. Part of modern Taiwanese culture is a dislike or outright contempt for older, slower, more traditional things in favor of the new and shiny. Parents of children today had a totally different life growing up than their children do, and many seem determined to avoid having their children experience the hardships of the old days, including the conformist methods of traditional education.
When you look at an older textbook, the meaning of each and every character you read is often spelled out for you by authors and teachers who come from the old school, passed down through thousands of years of study and commentary. Many parents and teachers, while understanding that this wall of ancient information is an important chunk of cultural learning, have come to believe that the contemporary system of education is stifled by the old system. Many say that they hate the old books for telling them what they were supposed to think about ancient poetry, history and philosophy, and at the same time they bemoan the current method of making kids take one test after another, saying that it stunts innovation and creativity while trying to cram a mountain of knowledge into a little boy or girl's brain. Yet they still feel compelled to uphold this strategy, sending their kids to after school cram lessons, music lessons, calligraphy classes and tons of extra curricular activities in desperate attempt to help their kids develop into whole people. Like one friend said of ours said, many parents "pull on the rice sprout, trying to stretch it's stalk."
Well, I'll have none of that. This stalk is already as big as he's going to get. I'm just going to keep studying ancient Chinese and hoping that, someday, it bears fruit.
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