Political atmosphere spells trouble for literature teacher in Taiwan
- Alice Ou is caught up in a storm just weeks before island’s key election by suggesting some classic Chinese texts be restored to the classroom
I failed Chinese in Hong Kong secondary school. But that doesn’t say much since I did in most subjects anyway, including English. While I never regretted not remembering any chemistry or algebra, I do wish I had a better foundation in Chinese. If nothing else, just so I could read the classics without having to refer to translations.
I tell you this just so you can guess I am biased in support of Alice Ou, a high school Chinese literature teacher from Taipei who has inadvertently been caught up in a political storm. Her crime? She told the island’s Legislative Yuan that schools should restore some classic texts dropped from the classroom recently.
She claimed that curriculum guidelines released in 2019 problematically “de-emphasised” classical Chinese and “de-Sinicised” education.
Now you may think, what’s the big deal? It’s a perfectly respectable position for a Chinese literature teacher to take. You may agree or disagree with her. But it’s doubtful that as a mere teacher, her opinion would count for much in education policy circles.
But boy, has she got herself into hot water! Editorials from big media have been written against Ou for trying to indoctrinate students. Politicians from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and other pro-independence parties have denounced her.
Beijing-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) presidential candidate and New Taipei City Mayor Hou Yu-ih was asked leading questions by reporters about Ou. Former president and KMT bigwig Ma Ying-jeou had to come out to defend her, saying the debate was about culture and language, not politics.
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Unfortunately for Ou, in the run-up to the presidential election next month, anything can be politicised. Ou probably didn’t think she was saying anything controversial. But for more than a decade, the DPP and its allies have been “de-Sinicising” to promote a separate Taiwan identity from the Chinese mainland. Outgoing DPP President Tsai Ing-wen has advocated respect for “the freedom of identity”, or emphasising any indigenous cultural elements so long as they are distinct from the mainland.
In this political atmosphere, anything that seems to promote mainland Chinese values such as the intrinsic importance of classical language is automatically suspect. That is also politically convenient, as it works against the KMT, which supports “one China”.
That’s quite ironic, though, considering Confucian classics are still taught as part of school curriculums in South Korea and Japan. This is because they are culturally confident enough to acknowledge Chinese influence from the past, unlike Taiwan under the DPP.
Ou teaches at a much sought-after so-called prestige school, so most parents there naturally expect high academic achievement from their children, and that includes not just good but excellent knowledge of Chinese. She was probably not just speaking for herself.
Now I am no expert on Taiwan’s curriculum policy. But it seems the 2019 guidelines emphasise reading comprehension, and oral and written expressions to complement vernacular Chinese (Mandarin) spoken in Taiwan. They counsel moving away from “the rote learning” of classical Chinese.
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Of course, parents, teachers, and intellectuals have been arguing these two positions – language utility vs classical learning – ever since the end of the last Chinese dynasty, and we will keep on arguing till kingdom come!
There is something similar in the West. Many parents and teachers in North America and Britain nowadays think Shakespeare is a complete waste of time; worse, a classical education promotes elitism and is undemocratic.
Nevertheless, most expensive elite prep schools still teach him. Wouldn’t you want your children to have read Hamlet and Macbeth and could recite key passages from memory by the time they graduate from high school?
I think many parents living in the Chinese diaspora would want the same for their children with classical Chinese literature. There is no need to politicise something inherently good just because you are anti-communist.
