Ever since the Ministry of Education promulgated the 2019 curriculum guidelines, critics have always complained about the “mass reduction” of classical Chinese content. They say it is part of government efforts to “de-Sinicize” education, which has led to moral depravity and degeneracy in society.
With the recent controversy surrounding the omission of the Ming Dynasty academic Gu Yanwu’s (顧炎武) work Honesty and Morality (廉恥) in mind, the issue seems to never age as a hot election topic. However, perhaps it is worth thinking about whether classical Chinese still retains as much significance or importance in modern life as academics claim and what kind of impact it has on the public’s linguistic skills in the long run.
According to the 2019 curriculum, classical Chinese takes up 35 to 45 percent of the selected readings, meaning that students still have 15 famous classic Chinese texts as compulsory readings. As much as classical Chinese is aesthetically elegant and useful for reading ancient classics and understanding ancient philosophy and history, that utility lies mostly with professionals and Chinese enthusiasts. For the public, classical Chinese is akin to Latin — a dead language. As derivatives of classical Chinese, idioms and proverbs are still used in modern language as fancy rhetoric, but not as indispensable expressions.
The purpose of selected readings should be about teaching reading comprehension, as well as oral and written expression. As the public reads, writes and communicates in vernacular Chinese most of the time, it is not worth the effort to have students learn classical Chinese by rote. Further, while classical Chinese is a beautifully concise language, it is a poor (or problematic) means for expressing explicit and clear information. As ancient words and phrases are often ambiguous, experts have been debating if this is why the development of Chinese logic lags way behind Western logic.
From another aspect, critics of the curriculum have always maintained that selected texts play a vital role in shaping students’ values and character, as if to say that if someone has never read Honesty and Morality, they would somehow have no sense of shame or integrity. It is as if they hope to solve all the complex issues in a modern society with Confucian rites and archaic values born out of Chinese feudalistic society by cramming classical Chinese texts down students’ throats.
However, texts and language are, after all, a medium. Whether a person internalizes the values in a text so that it becomes part of their character or conduct depends on the person’s attitude, not what form the language takes or the number of texts written in it. If reading classical Chinese text does make someone a morally upright person, then the concept of a xiaoren (小人), or a “scoundrel, small or petty person,” would not have existed in ancient China. As a result, classical Chinese should not be put on a pedestal, nor should vernacular Chinese be overtly praised for being easy to understand.
The crux of the matter is perhaps the teaching of Taiwan’s languages and how they are taught. As one of the languages spoken in Taiwan, Chinese is the most widespread, and the decline in the public’s linguistic skills show that there is a critical problem. What should be addressed is how to elevate the public’s linguistic performance, instead of obsessing about the number of texts from thousands of years ago.
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