Taipei First Girls’ High School literature teacher Alice Ou’s (區桂芝) criticism of the move to de-emphasize classical Chinese in the 2019 curriculum guidelines opened the door for heated discourse on education policy and culture.
Ou’s position as an educator at one of Taiwan’s best high schools lends credence to her relatively reactionary argument that the cut in the number of classical Chinese texts was “a crime deserving more than 10,000 deaths.”
Classical content still averages about 35 to 45 percent of high-school Chinese literature textbooks, as opposed to 45 to 65 percent under the previous curriculum.
The continued sanctification of some classical Chinese texts by Sinocentric academics makes replacing them difficult.
While there is merit in studying the classics, the heavy focus on them means that students are denied the opportunity to delve deeper into contemporary Taiwanese literature.
Discussions of education reform cannot be separated from the local political context and the long history of Sinocentric colonization under the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in the post-war period.
Furthermore, advanced classical Chinese is often comprehensible to only the most erudite few.
The promotion of classical Chinese is often rooted in the desire to maintain an elitist hierarchy rather than for its inherent utility or beauty.
New Culture Movement reformer Hu Shih (胡適), a literary academic, once said: “A dead language can never produce a living literature.”
Hu’s promotion of written vernacular Chinese to replace classical Chinese paved the way for a vibrant blossoming of creative and diverse Chinese literati, in conjunction with an expanded readership in the 20th century — a turning point in the history of literature.
An obsession with classics at the expense of new creative endeavors is not particular to an Eastern context. The famed Library of Alexandria, widely known to house one of the most comprehensive collections of ancient texts, eventually saw a decline in reputation during the Roman Empire.
The majority of the academics at the library focused extensively on editing and producing commentary on classical works of Hellenistic poetry, rather than creating new original works.
The term “Alexandrian” began to take on a negative connotation of banality and pedantry.
Literary scholarship dies when all the writing produced is entirely self-referential and esoteric.
Ou also makes a convoluted moral argument, marked with inflammatory exaggerations, that traditional values will be lost if the classics are not studied. These statements bear some similarity to the New Life Movement, in which the KMT attempted to restore traditional moral values and even make Confucianism a state cult.
The value of a holistic humanities education is not in the maintenance of traditional values, but rather in providing young people with the necessary tools to create meaning and engage in contemporary cultural circles.
Neither culture nor language are static monoliths. The obsession with an unchanging “dead language” eventually leads to a dead culture lost in the ever-flowing currents of time.
Linus Chiou is a part-time writer based in Kaohsiung.
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