The ways of Heaven and Earth
"The fact is that children already understand the ways of Heaven and Earth," says Wang Chen-hua, who reached this conclusion teaching a cultural class for children several years ago. Theirs is a kind of silent understanding, an understanding about life that they themselves may be unconscious of having.
Many parents also observe that though it may seem as if children are blindly memorizing, they are in fact half understanding. One kid went to a "folk culture village," saw a carriage wheel, and quoted, "The thirty spokes of a wheel are useless without the spaces between them." Another kid who was quarreling with his little sister, stopped suddenly, apologized and said, "The softest thing on Earth can harness the hardest." And teachers have been given a startle to look in students' practice notebooks and find such famous classical passages as: "Study without thought is useless. Thought without studying is lazy." Or "A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." Of course, sometimes the children will quote out of context, and the results will make adults laugh. For example, a family went to eat pizza, and the schooled-in-classics little brother said, "What's not cut straight shouldn't be eaten."
Although people say that one can't demand immediate results and that an appreciation of the classics requires a lifetime to mature, you can see some concrete changes in two or three years. Consider these "extra benefits."
Wang Tsai-kuei's son Wang Hsuan-li is a senior in high school and started reciting the classics when he was in the third grade. Along the way he has read the Four Classics, Laozi, the Book of History, the I Ching, the essay collection Guwen Guanzhi, the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government and others. Meanwhile, he went from being ranked thirty-something in his third-grade class to being among the top few students. Then he skipped a year, and entered high school a year early. This can not be said to be unrelated to his having studied Chinese. "Reading the classics has improved my memory and made it much easier to concentrate while studying."
In university he wants to major in philosophy and "study conceptions of life and the universe." His future goals are "to help people and society." "The classics are absolutely correct," says this younger Wang, whose powers of reflection are great. "You've got to be friendly and tolerant of others. Only when you've got it right yourself can you go make requests of others. For me to know these principles but not try to practice them would be wrong." Smiling, he adds, "I think the kids learning the classics now hold more hope than me."
Hundreds of thousands
Most of the classics courses today take place outside of regular school, but very few parents have the time to read with their children. Wouldn't it be better-save time and energy-to recite the classics in school?
This is Wang Tsai-kuei's ideal. Reading the classics started in society outside of the educational system. Now it has entered a stage of being half-way in the system, as supplementary education or an extracurricular activity. Eventually, it may enter the system, with classes in elementary schools or with the reading of the classics included in Chinese class. It's just that after it enters the system, can it avoid becoming overly rigid itself as a topic for exams? If it does, how much of the original meaning of reciting the classics will be preserved? These are all problems worth noting.
Wang's goal is to get 100,000 students to read the classics by the end of 1996. Now he has already got 15,000 participating, and he predicts that by the end of the year the number will reach 10,000. His wife, Hsu Tuan, has organized squads of volunteers at the Hua Shan Forum's Classics Promotion Center to go to neighborhood centers and religious groups to promote the idea of reciting the classics. The members themselves have started reading them. "Otherwise how can we convince others?" And some enthusiastic teachers have compiled rosters of teachers, putting names from all over the province on the same list, so that those putting on classes can support each other and not have to struggle alone.
Having promoted the classics for several years, Wang has encountered many setbacks, but these haven't discouraged him. According to his own statistics, "About 30 percent of the kids love to recite the classics, 30 percent hate the activity, and 40 percent could take it or leave it. But because I started from scratch, gaining anyone is making progress." There are 2 million grade school kids in Taiwan. If 100,000 were reading the classics, the activity would be a force to be reckoned with. When it reaches that number, he will turn his focus to getting adults to read the classics so as to cultivate teachers. In this way, when the kids get older, there will be people to explain the classics to them.
Many hope that efforts can be expanded to include mainland China and Chinese communities overseas. The mainland has passed through the calamities of the Cultural Revolution and the suppression of the "Four Olds" (old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits), and there is even more need for the classics to put down roots again. But political factors make breakthroughs there difficult. Still, in recent years, as Taiwan residents have visited family in the mainland, established business interests there, or made donations through ancestral place associations, hundreds of guidebooks for reciting the classics have been brought over to the mainland. These have even drawn the notice of the authorities there. As for overseas Chinese, efforts can be directed through the Overseas Affairs Commission and religious organizations with branches abroad, or can be promoted through the local Chinese schools. The Hua Shan Forum claims that classics courses have been started in overseas communities in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
"What's the purpose of reading the saints and sages? Only to learn how to be a human being." Perhaps this movement is about returning culture to its original place.
[Picture Caption]
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In recent years classics courses in which students read directly from Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, etc., have been held all over Taiwan. Such classes form one wave of a movement to revive ancient culture.
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Confucius editing the classics and teaching his students from a Ming edition of the Analects. Confucian theories have formed the mainstream of Chinese thought. (courtesy of the National Central Library)
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When you mention reciting the classics, what often floats to mind are images of youths bobbing their heads as they read in the movie Liang Shan-po and Chu Ying-tai.(courtesy of The National Film Archive)
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Many parents are worried about social disorder, and as soon as they hear about courses teaching children to read the classics, they enroll their kids, hoping their characters will be shaped by the wisdom of the ancient sages.
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Wang Tsai-kuei has forcefully promoted having children recite the classics. Having them read the classics when their memories are strongest isn't "force-feeding," he argues.
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In a traditional-style class, the students first bow to a statue of Confucius.
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Today and yesterday juxtaposed: Texts used by children to recite the classics, next to Chinese textbooks from the Japanese era.
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Strike the bell! It's time for classics class.
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How much wisdom about Heaven and Earth are packed in these volumes?
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In the Pescadores, the classics have already entered the schools' regular curricula. In Chuwan Elementary School, for instance, the principal le ads the entire student body reciting in the early morning before clean-up.
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Taipei's Tzehui Tang School sponsored Taiwan's first children's classics reading competition in August. With many kids participating and parents offering encouragement by their sides, it made for a high-spirited scene!