The idea of getting kids to read the classics has floated across the water to the Pescadore Islands, where it has entered the regular schools' curricula. Of the 7000 odd students in the county, more than 2000 are reading the classics. Even some nursery school students can read passages quite competently. What kind of special soil do the Pescadores have to cultivate such a flourishing expanse of blooms? And can their methods be applied elsewhere?
In October the Pescadorean sky lacks the clearness of summer, and the clouds herald fall. After driving across all 76 spans of the Cross-Sea Bridge, we arrive at the Chuwan Grade School in Hsiyu.
At 7:00 in the morning the children start arriving one after another and prepare to read the classics. Because we are guests who have come from afar, Principal Chen Jen-ho leads the entire student body of 60 to a nearby ancestral temple on a "school trip." They come to a halt at the front of the temple plaza and start by reciting a few Hsiyu fishermen's proverbs, such as, "The big fish don't take the bait, while the little fish jump eagerly for it." After they've gathered their concentration, real class begins, and they read from the Analects. There are a few abandoned traditional Chinese family compounds nearby, which the students jokingly call "ghost houses." The principal uses their term as a springboard for quoting the Analects, "Confucius speaks not of the strange, the violent, the disorderly or the supernatural."
A student at the school some 40 years ago, Chen was just this year reassigned to Chuwan from an outer island. He uses the early study hall to lead the students in reciting the classics. On Tuesdays it's the Analects of Confucius; on Thursdays the Taoists Laozi and Zhuangzi, and on Saturdays Tang dynasty poetry. Besides the main fare of classical Chinese, he spices the pot with some local produce, such as Taiwanese songs, Hsiyu proverbs, and facts about the local ecology. The children recite with gusto.
As the teacher corrects homework, the children take turns leading the class in reciting from the classics.
A general mobilization
Similar classics courses have been opened in schools all over the Pescadores. A few of the tiny schools on the outer islands have truly gone all out to involve everyone. Most schools teach the classics whenever they can find the time. This means during morning study hall, when teachers are correcting homework, or when the food is being prepared during lunch period.
Lin Pi-Chin, a teacher at Makung Elementary School, says, "Some teachers complain that leading the kids in reciting the classics is an extra duty, but if you use the time left over from regular lessons, or you let the kids lead each other, it will in fact save you a lot of energy." Every time she's grading tests or homework, she gets the students to take turns leading the class in reading. They all eagerly await their turns, and the sound of their clear and strong voices is almost ear-splitting. Teachers have discovered that reading with the students is a good way to get them to settle down when they start talking among themselves. After merrily chanting a few chapters, they'll start their regular lessons in relaxed states of mind.
When kids in nursery school and kindergarten read the classics aloud, not only do they start to learn how to recognize characters, but their understanding of what they recite often surprises people.
A thirty-something teacher
During summer and winter vacations there are intensive courses in reciting the classics, when students go to a set school every morning Monday through Friday. These classes are taught by locals who have left the islands to attend college in Taiwan. Most are students in teacher-training colleges who return to their alma maters to lead their young friends in reciting the classics. They do it both to earn some extra money and to get some hands-on experience teaching.
And so during these vacation courses, college kids sit in the classrooms with little kids. From time to time the slow summer days will make some students want to shirk their duties, and sometimes a teacher will have to go to the beach to bring students back to class. But most children think that reciting the classics is a lot of fun. "It's both a good way to pass the time and adds to your learning," says Chen Wen-hsiang, who finished up at Chuwan Elementary School last school year. "And you also get to study some nursery rhymes and proverbs, which are pretty cool!"
Even younger kids in nursery school are cutting their teeth on the classics.
Hsu Hui-yen, a teacher at a municipal nursery school in Makung, says that children's innocent interpretations of the classics often delight their elders. Once everyone guessed at the teacher's age. Instead of blurting out, "Weren't you my high school classmate?"-as a young man in a television commercial does, trying to place a youthful-looking woman (who turns out to have been his high school teacher)-they said, "Teacher, you establish yourself at 30" (a line from Confucius). And although these tykes haven't even studied Mandarin phonetic symbols yet, they are already picking up characters. Recognizing their friends' names, they help the teacher hand out their practice notebooks.
Unforgettable
Why is it that classics education is flourishing here of all places, in the remote Pescadores?
"The countryside doesn't have the music and art classes that are found in cities, and there is less cultural stimulation, but we've got plenty of time," says a smiling Chen Jen-ho. Life is simple here, and the children are pure at heart, so it is easier for them to accept having to read the classics.
"Those who understand the advantages of reciting the classics will naturally be supportive," observes Chen En-shang, principal of the Waian Elementary School in Hsiyu. "Those who don't still won't want their children passing their days playing video games, and think that whatever the children do at school is OK by them."
The local people have vigorously promoted the activity, and their support is a major factor in its success. And many principals and teachers share a belief in its value.
For the older generation of educators, reading the classics is a way of stressing tradition. The Pescadores have a rich educational history. The Wenshih Shuyuan, the islands' first school, was established in 1776. When the Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan and the Pescadores to Japan in 1895, local people turned the school into a Confucian Temple to preserve their cultural heritage. During the Japanese era, teachers in the privately supported village schools would secretly teach Chinese as a way to compete with the government's Japanese schools.
"People shouldn't forget traditional culture," says Wu Tzu-lung, principal of the Makung Elementary School, noting that the classics are a cultural legacy. He still remembers clearly the classics that he memorized in village schools both before and after the retrocession of Taiwan a half century ago. Once, while leading a summer class, he taught the students to read using Taiwanese pronunciation.
In 1994, Professor Wang Tsai-kuei was twice invited to the Pescadores to lecture to elementary school teachers on "How to teach children to recite the classics." More than 120 teachers attended his first lecture, sponsored by the Hsiyu Rural Township Educational Society. For his second talk, he went to the County Cultural Center and spoke to 160 teachers and more than 100 high school students from all over the county. Afterwards, locals began putting on intensive summer classes and drawing up the Pescadores' "Three-Year Plan for Teaching the Classics." The Hua Shan Forum in Taipei generously donated nearly 2000 readers to the students of Hsiyu Township and the outer islands and helped to pay the wages of the summer teachers.
Opening up to Grandma
The donated books got things off to a good start. But if you're looking to figure out why reciting the classics has become so popular in the Pescadores, don't overlook Hsiao Li-ling, a teacher of Chinese at Makung High. Holding an affinity for the classics since she was a child, Hsiao heard Wang Tsai-kuei lecture in Taichung three years ago about teaching children to recite the classics. Feeling that they shared ideals, when Hsiao returned to the Pescadores, she started putting on classes at her home and then began promoting the cause wherever and whenever she could.
"Back then, most people didn't think there was any need to recite the classics. They viewed the activity as outdated and useless for preparing for the joint entrance exams for high school and college," she recalls. "And so when I first went out to advocate these courses, I cited examples to show their practical benefits, explaining how reading the classics could help raise scores on the Chinese sections on the entrance exams and improve memorization skills. For the more far-sighted I would extol the activity as the basis of Chinese education and a way to study the moral principles of the ancient sages."
Teachers and students who participated in the intensive summer courses wrote pieces about the experience which were printed in newspapers, and parents were surprised by how quickly their children learned to recite from memory. The kids themselves showed enthusiasm for this extra-curricular activity because nothing more was required than reading aloud; they didn't have to copy anything over, or take written exams, and if they didn't do such a great job of memorizing the passages they wouldn't get punished. And they enjoyed performing: "Confucius says...." One grandmother, moved to tears, said that it was only after her grandson started to recite the classics that he opened up and started to talk with her. The Ministry of Education and the County Cultural Center both expressed their support, and principals, teachers and parents, including many who were at first skeptical, joined the ranks of those in favor of the classes.
Lacking funds
Today, after being promoted for two years, classics education in the Pescadores is flourishing, and the numbers enrolled in these classes keep growing. Yet now funds are needed both to buy new books and to pay for the upcoming winter vacation classes.
At first the Hua Shan Forum was focusing its book donations on Hsiyu and the outer islands. The students in the Makung area didn't have books, and the teachers didn't think it was appropriate to ask the parents for more money, so they made do as best they could. Some teachers turned Xeroxed copies into a wall chart, or else they copied the passages out on the blackboard. Others just did it all orally. Some enthusiastic parents even bought books for the entire class.
The Hua Shan Forum, which has provided more than NT$1 million in support of classics education in the Pescadores, hopes that the islands will be able to pay their own way, and is encouraging Pescadorean entrepreneurs on Taiwan and charitable organizations to pick up where it leaves off, so that classics will continue to be recited in the Pescadores.
Big sea, blue sky, the classics
If you walk through villages in the Pescadores, you will frequently see abandoned buildings and old fields long since overgrown with dense groves of silver silk trees. Many schools, such as Chuwan with only 60 students, are cutting back on classes.
The drain of people has become unstoppable. And it isn't easy to get college students to come back on their summer vacations to work as teachers, because many are preparing to get higher degrees or just have other things to do. Many of them want to stay on Taiwan island.
Hsiao Li-ling has mixed emotions about the exodus. On the one hand she hopes that children will want to stay here, but on the other hand she wants them to spread their wings and fly. Whatever the case, "For the moment let them stay in a peaceful place, study a little more, and build a foundation. Only by so doing will they make successes of themselves." The blue sky and water, the clean air, and a familiarity with the classics can all have an effect on the way these children turn out.
In front of the ancestral temple in Chuwan, Principal Chen Jen-ho leads everyone in reading from the Analects of Confucius: "'A mensch has nothing to hide; a cur is racked by anxiety.' Who wants to be a cur?" he asks. Two or three of the older children, giggling, raise their hands and then bring them down. Now he asks, "Who wants to be a mensch?" This time everybody raises their hands toward the blue sky.
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The big sea, the blue sky, and the sound of the classics being read aloud, in the Pescadores the locals have strongly supported these courses, making classics education there flourish. Many small schools have mobilized their entire student bodies to recite the classics together.
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As the teacher corrects homework, the children take turns leading the class in reciting from the classics.
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When kids in nursery school and kindergarten read the classics aloud, not only do they start to learn how to recognize characters, but their understanding of what they recite often surprises people.
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