I recently read a column in a magazine, titled "Pain", written by a renowned author Lam Yin Nei. The pain she is referring to is not physical pain, but rather, feeling a pain for Chinese history.
So the article says it is painful to see Chinese has good inventions like the compass and the fireworks, but there wasn't much technical development. It is painful to see that the ancient education curriculum only push the students to read classics and ancient poetry, and recite "Confucious says..." and "Mencius says...", rather than encourage students to think for themselves. The most pain is the constant military conflicts among each other.
Chinese love to brag about their glorious ancient history (the good times), such as the Tang and Song dynasty. After all, there isn't much other things to brag about. Not many of them bring up the dark days of the opium wars and the Japanese invasion of WWII. Not many dare to mention the corruptions at all levels of government. Fewer dares to bring up Cultural Revolution and the Tianenmen square in 198...
About the classics and poetry that ancient Chinese education system requires: these may actually be good things. After all, Confucious and Mencius have some good things to say. But rather than have them recite this stuff, make them think about pros and cons. Anyone can be the next Confucious.
What ancient Chinese lacked was willingness to breakthrough and even challenge accepted ideas. They needed much more in their curriculum.
The old poetry have some great beauty within the languages. They describe scenes, thoughts of leaving buddies in compact phrases. But what do we do with them? These poetry lack application. Ok, one application is to impress well educated ladies, that's it.
About endless military conflicts, perhaps it is not just a Chinese thing, but a human thing. Corrupted government spurs revolts. Run the government well and no one will risk to overturn you. If we can eliminate the greed of the corrupted guys we can solve a lot of problems. All anicent government officials passed exams of Confucious, who focus on concept of "kindness". That should have ensured they will be kind to the people, right? It would be naive to think so.
2 comments:
1) The Chinese people need to unify. Let's start with the language - discourage local dialects, even Cantonese; make sure 1 billion people speak PuTongHwa. Secondly, romanize! like the Japanese, for easier data processing, much faster typing, easier to pick up.
2) Human rights; general attitude change. Boys and Girls should be equally precious
3) Overhaul the medicine system, and adapt the real medical sciences. Terms like "BoSun" (protect the kidney) "GinPay" (strenghten the spleen) are not quantitive, not scientific, just laughable claims.
Romanization is bad idea. It will whack the uniqueness of Chinese. Simplified Chinese has already done big damage to the Chinese language.
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