Confucius reawakes

When 36 fresh Shanghai high school students received their new Chinese classical textbooks at the beginning of this semester, it might seem like another routine day at the school affiliated to Fudan University.

It might, except the textbooks all came from Taiwan and they have been adopted by more than 30 high schools on the Chinese mainland for the first time in six decades.

"The students are quite into it and love reading the textbook," said their teacher, surnamed Wang, who refused to give his full name. They study the classics course 40 minutes a week, but do not take an exact exam on it.

"The textbooks have a sound arrangement of the classics and do an excellent job of integrating ancient wisdom into modern life, which lacks of textbooks made on the mainland," Wang said.

Published in late August on the mainland, the textbook was hailed by the media as an improvement on mainland classical education, which is less systematic and weak in teaching experience.

A shortage of qualified teachers and an intense exam system in the mainland are commonly cited as the two major obstacles in rejuvenating and boosting the study of Chinese classics.

Compulsory vs optional

Compulsory for Taiwan's high school students, the textbook selects articles from Confucian classics and provides interpretations, with sections that connect with modern life and provoke insightful discussions.

Mainland publisher Zhonghua Book Company spent a year revising the textbooks by changing the modern Taiwanese anecdotes into more mainland-oriented stories for mainland students. The story of a Taiwanese educator, for example, was replaced by a model worker in a section on Confucius and his disciple.

Finding demand was high, Zhonghua set up a center to research and promote Chinese classical education in 2009. Many mainland schools have launched their own courses and drafted their own textbooks, creating an unsystematic approach to the issue.

"Taiwan has a unified curriculum standard for the Confucian, but the mainland doesn't," center director Zhu Anshun told the Global Times. "Courses related to the classics are launched as school-based special courses on the mainland."

The new textbooks had been introduced under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, which has been encouraging these grass-roots school-based pilot courses, Zhu explained.

The ministry has begun experimenting with Chinese classical education in recent years and in 2008 launched the reading and reciting of classics.

Teacher shortage

"Traditional Chinese culture should be considered good fortune when it comes to the education of students' virtues. Chinese education is in great need of traditional culture and we should promote it," the head of the Communist Party committee of the Wuhan-based Middle School attached to Huazhong University of Science and Technology surnamed Zhang told the Global Times. He refused to reveal his full name.

Zhang's school was among the first receiving the Taiwanese textbooks, but the school has not used them yet, even though they have been distributed to every member of the school's faculty.

The course launch might be postponed to a year, he said, as teachers need time to prepare for the new course and new textbooks, given the fact that no similar classics courses have been launched before.

"The biggest problem we face is how to arrange timetables and prepare the faculty," Zhang said, noting the pressure of exams and a lack of qualified teachers.

The school plans to recruit new teachers equipped with knowledge of the Chinese classics, he said.

Most mainland university graduates and teachers haven't learned traditional culture systematically, Zhu admitted, and teachers' average better knowledge of the classics was often low by national standards.

"But that should not be an excuse to stop promoting education of the classics," Zhu said. "We can begin from schools with better faculties and let social institutes provide service and instructions to teachers."