Confucius reawakes(2)

System buzz

Beijing 101 Middle School gave up on the textbooks, Beijing Youth Daily reported on September 28.

"We're not saying the textbooks aren't good," the report quoted a teacher from the school as saying, "but they just don't work well.

"Because the contents are too abundant and too systematic, they don't suit our teaching syllabus. The class time allocated to classics courses will be very limited. But the content of the Taiwanese textbook is too much and we just cannot arrange enough time for students to digest it."

Failing to include classics in exams makes the textbooks even less attractive, Zhang agreed, but expressed optimism exams would increasingly include more classics content in future.

The new textbook should be applauded as mainlanders don't have one, said Gong Pengcheng, a Taiwanese scholar specializing in Chinese classics.

But it was a bad idea to blindly copy the Taiwanese practice by including classics in exams, he believed.

"Students in Taiwan have to recite the classics and interpretations to deal with exams, making them dislike learning it," Gong said. "But on the mainland, students won't learn it as they are not included in the exam.

"The point is to change the exam-oriented system."

Learning Chinese classics has become trendy in recent years, with private schools focusing on setting up courses. A growing number of parents have sent their children to private schools instead of public ones, which Gong characterized as resistance to the current mainland education system.

But such parents are still a minority as private schools are not well suited to college or high school entrance exams.

"We see the possibility that there will be a reasonable balance between the exam-oriented system and boosting the learning of classics," Zhu said. "We're encouraged to attempt this as we observe students from some renowned schools with classics courses have better competency and their performances in exams are not affected.

"We can assume that having the courses might even boost their exam performances."