Mainland: we can talk about writing system

The mainland makes a non-committal but favorable response to the now retracted call in Taiwan to come to a writing system consensus on both sides of the strait.

Hakka

The MOE continues to work on standardizing Hakka:

《臺灣客家語書寫推薦用字》公聽會即日起開始報名
臺灣客家語拼音方案

Korean textbook controversy not unlike Taiwan's internal debate

While the DPP administration and reputable publishers never went so far as to actually teach children that the KMT constituted an occupying foreign power, that is in fact how many people on the Green side feel. Take a look at this IHT article on a Korean textbook controversy.

To conservative critics, a popular textbook's version of how U.S. and Soviet forces took control of Korea from Japanese colonialists in 1945 exemplifies all that's wrong with how South Korean history is taught to young people today.

The facts no one disputes are that, at the end of World War II, the Soviet military swept into northern Korea and installed a friendly Communist government while a U.S. military administration assumed control in the south.

But then the high school textbook takes a direction that is raising hackles among conservatives. It argues that the Japanese occupation was followed not by a free, self-determining Korea, but by a divided peninsula dominated once again by foreign powers.

"It was not our national flag that was hoisted to replace the Japanese flag," reads the textbook published by Kumsung Publishing. "The flag that flew in its place was the American Stars and Stripes. Our liberation through the Allied forces' victory prevented us from building a new country according to our own wishes."

The article continues.

MOE stresses the classics

This news almost entirely escaped the attention or interest of the English media:

The Ministry of Education (MOE) announced yesterday plans to increase the number of Chinese literature classes and the percentage of classical Chinese literary works in the nation’s high school curriculum. Vice Education Minister Wu Tsai-shun (吳財順) told reporters in the ministry that the number of Chinese literature classes offered in high school had been reduced to four sessions per week in the curriculum guidelines published in 2006 year. The amount of classical Chinese literature in high school Chinese literature textbooks has dropped to 45 percent, Wu said. “What we are certain now is that classical Chinese literary works will account for more than 45 percent of the content of high school Chinese literature textbooks,” Wu said. Wu said the ministry would also make Analects of Confucius (論語) and the Works of Mencius (孟子), both of which were optional under previous regulations, required reading for high school students.

The lack of interest does not extend to the Chinese language media, even in China. And some still find the increase in classical content to be inadequate.

I am generally supportive of efforts to keep the younger generation literate in Classical Chinese, but don't like the way this new policy.

Let us be clear exactly what the new policy means: the increase in Classical Literature --

(1) directly equates into less time for modern prose and poetry and local authors;

(2) cements a Confucian-oriented education system by requiring the Analects and Mencius with no attention being paid to Zhuangzi, Hanfeizi, Laozi and other classical philosophers (as that first Liberty Times article points out, it's almost like the KMT wants to relive the Han dynasty); and

(3) is likely almost 100% ideologically driven, by those conservative elements who wish to revive the 'old days' of China-oriented thinking. They are more interested in forcing kids to read several-thousand-year-old texts than they are in improving the education system in some substantial way. The system has plenty of real problems no matter who you ask. Classical Chinese has to be the least of them.