How do you go about teaching children to recite the classics? Great erudition isn't required. All that you need is an ability to lead children reading aloud, over and over again. Classical Chinese frequently has rhymes, and a sing-song rhythm comes easily to the lips when reading it aloud.

Still, if you are thinking of teaching children one-on-one at home, it might be better to heed Chinese idioms to "teach one another's children"or"extend love for one's own children to others" and invite other kids over to recite with your own. Otherwise, these traditional methods might seem strange to a single child. He might not adapt to them well or might even rebel: "No one else is reading this. Why do I have to?" In any case, with companions, everyone will copy each other and compete, and it will make things more interesting.

The teacher can keep things fresh through variation, by changing the speed, combining reading and singing, or perhaps even letting the children take turns leading the class or read Tang poems in Taiwanese (which is closer in pronunciation to classical Chinese anyway). If the children start to lose patience or nod off, split the class into groups and play word games or have question-and-answer competitions. It will quickly revive flagging spirits.

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!

Carrot instead of stick

Compared with the old privately supported Chinese village schools, to-day's classes are much more relaxed and happy affairs. In a village school in the countryside near Nanjing in the 1920s, one class might have students ranging in age from six or seven to 17 or 18, and the teacher would have to design separate curricula to meet each of their needs. As soon as the students arrived, the school would reverberate with the sound of them reading aloud. The teacher would go in front of a student's desk or call out his name t o signify that it was his turn to read. If he was tongue-tied or tripped up three times while reading, he would be beaten, and would have to kneel in front of the statue of Confucius and do his best to remember until the teacher deemed his performance acceptable and told him to start on a new lesson.

To get students to read the classics today, teachers use the carrot instead of the stick, arousing students' sense of accomplishment. Teachers may, for instance, give grades orally, liberally granting 90s and 100s, or they might award cards or stamps, and give out prizes after students accumulate a certain number of them. Others use a score sheet to keep track of how students have read. Each time a child reads a passage from start to finish, a check goes in a box.

Hsieh Jung-mei, a teacher at the Tungu branch of the Taipei Public Library, wants both to prick children's interest and to avoid getting students used to working only for material gain and reading only for the sake of prizes. Walking this fine line isn't easy.

Parents make the difference

Most classes meet for an hour and a half once a week, with three half-hour class periods: one for the Confucian Analects, Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean; one for the Taoists Laozi and Zhuangzi, and one for Tang dynasty poetry. To prevent students from getting overly judgmental about which passages are important, Wang Tsai-kuei recommends not making selections but reading straight through. While in class, he suggests reviewing the work that was memorized last session and then moving on to the current week's material. Normally, a class can get through about ten chapters of Confucius in one period, a chapter or two of Laozi, or 2 0 or 30 lines of Tang poetry. Some teachers throw in some other works, such as The Book of Odes, Song dynasty poetry, Yuan dynasty drama or even the I Ching.

Many teachers encourage parents to come to class and join in. With classes just once a week, they suggest that parents supervise reading at home every day. Because students are coming to the activity passively, they need to feel parents' support and insistence. Otherwise, as soon as they hit a bit of slow going, they'll feel bored and loose interest, and may well quit.

If children can read 20 or 30 minutes every day, results will be good. When the going is slow, parents can join the children reciting or play word games with them. Since the children will often outperform their parents, such parental participation will strengthen the children's self-confidence. Some parents not only read along with their children, but also look through reference books for explanations of what they are reading. To capture the children's interest, they interpret passages or describe historical incidents that are related to what they are reading. The Classics Promotion Center has declared 8:00-8:30pm "classics reading time," encouraging everyone to let "the sounds of classic Chinese literature float to the sky."

If you think the information presented in these articles isn't enough, you can read Wang Tsai-kuei's "Teaching Children to Recite the Classics." in which he draws from his many years of experience teaching. The booklet and its secrets are available free of charge from the Center. It explains what one gains from reading the classics and how to open a class, and introduces teaching materials and basic theories and methods. If readers abroad are interested, Sinorama can send it to you. The center also publishes a Classics Newsletter, which prints what students and teachers have to say about their experiences reading the classics, as well as listing contact phone numbers and the addresses of places offering classes.