Primary Sources—Introduction (g) Impassioned Communities

One year ago on Round and Square (27 May 2011)—Le Tour de la France: Respite on the Road 
Click here to access Round and Square's "Primary Sources" Resource Center 

Introduction (a)—Education and Enculturation          Introduction (b)—Traditional Education     
Introduction (c)—Contemporary Education               Introduction (d)—Hong Kong and Taiwan

Introduction (e)—Butterflies                                       Introduction (f)—K-12, c.1985
Introduction (g)—Impassioned Communities            Introduction (h)—History, Language, and Culture, c.1985

[19]

I had found the breadcrumbs, and my path back to elementary education began at that moment. I reached for the pile, and pulled out—by chance—the slender book covering the language arts for the first semester of third grade. The cover of that text is featured at the top of this post. I noticed the little social triad on the cover. I pondered the expressions on every face, including the dog's. 

[a] Rural community RF

I opened the book, paging through all twenty-four texts and the eight sets of reviews (one review after each three-text set). Now I was in a different world. Even things I regarded as familiar seemed tinged with difference. Here was Chiang Kai-shek scolding a Japanese military school teacher who criticized China; there was Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb. The stories were just didactic enough to make me blink and read passages over. A few were so ideologically skewed, to my mind, that I wondered how they could possibly be used in third grade classrooms. 

Why on earth would children donate piggy banks to buy warheads?

But there they were, along with Republic of China flags, rural sunsets, kittens, goats, and puppies. I was hooked. I started to sense what the store clerk had been saying that afternoon. These texts were the foundation of education for every student in Taiwan. They were shared by a growing generation born in the 1970s and going to elementary school in the mid-1980s. Every little third grader walking to school tomorrow morning would know what I was reading. It was an elementary community, and an imagined one, at that. Third graders from Kaohsiung, Taipei, Taichung, and Keelung memorized (and were tested on) the same texts, just as were all of the students in rural schools dotting the island from tip to tip. Further, it was an elementary community in a Durkheimian (and Lévi-Straussian) sense. There was something basic—foundational—about what was going on here.

[b] Tip RF

They were even more than that, though. Many of these texts were shared by several generations. I know this because my interests have always been historical as well as anthropological, and I felt that I was exploring another world in this sea of texts. It has been said that "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." I soon understood that although these books represented just a slice of time—I had purchased the 1985 school year version of them all—there were extraordinary hints of both past and future in them.

[20]

In fact, the 1985 texts forming the core of this "Primary Sources" series all have extraordinary connections with the texts used a decade or more earlier on Taiwan. In turn, they would be used for another decade after that before giving way to a very different kind of textbook in the late-1990s. In other words, these little green 國語課本 books created a bond between readers that forged almost instant familiarity between children and adults of very different ages.

How would I know that? Easy. I lived it. I read the literary and communal passion in "their" eyes.

[c] Luminosity RF

Beginning with that day, I became a part of that bonded educational community. Little did I know it then, but it began a few years earlier, in an intensive first-year Chinese summer course at the University of British Columbia, My teacher, Roberto Ong, started the process. One day in class, while imploring us to study with far more effort than we might have thought possible, he reminisced about an elementary school text he had read thirty years before. He told of a primary school reader with a story of Thomas Edison and his indefatigable work on the light bulb. The way Professor Ong told it, it was a story of darkness turning into light amidst perseverance. His normal composure was punctuated by this mnemonic bulb, illuminating while we watched and listened. It seemed like a minor soliloquy at the time—an elementary school flashback by a teacher in his late-thirties, making him seem all the more ancient to his "young" college-age charges. 

And there I was, at the kitchen table, almost choking on Oolong leaves as I read my teacher's story—detail for detail in the third-grade reader.

     有一次,  有人問他, 在那麼多發明品當中, 他最滿意
     的是哪一件. 他回答說: "電燈." 再問他為甚麼, 他說, 
     有了電燈, 世界就不再有黑暗了.

          Someone once asked [Edison] which of his inventions gave him the most
          satisfaction. He answered: "the light bulb." When asked to clarify, he said
          that with the light bulb the world need no longer have darkness.

[d] Cultural light RF

[21]

There's more. The community spirit worked the other way, too. Twenty years after my first encounter with primary textual culture, I chatted after class with one of my students. I knew she had grown up in Taiwan. She stayed after class to talk, and I was surprised by how animated she was that afternoon. She told me that she had listened to my classroom story about studying culture from "the bottom up"—an early version of the themes in this series. In the process, I had explained how formative these K-6 texts were in my developing understanding of Chinese culture, generally, and life on Taiwan, specifically. In particular, I had told about the linkage forged with my teacher in the land of third-grade Edison.

"We read the same books!," she enthused. "I read the story about Thomas Edison, too!" 

In that moment, I realized that I shared a core educational experience with a teacher twenty years older than me...and a student twenty years younger. My teacher had presumably read the text in 1960. My student read it in 1990. They were both eight years old. I read it in 1985, even though I was twenty-something and careening through a rapid-fire K-12 education over the course of eighteen months. We were the fragments of an impassioned community spanning three or more decades of lived—and read—experience.

Notes
[1] Guomin xiaoxue guoyu keben [國民小學國語課本], 1985, 3a, 56.

[e] Natural light RF

NEXT

History, Language, and Culture, c. 1985

We wrap up the long introduction to this series (its heft is well in keeping with the 276 texts that will follow) by finishing the story told by my student about the little green books. We will then conclude with an overview of the posts we'll confront in "Primary Sources."