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Education and Morality in Taiwan
From: London School of Economics and Political Science
| By:
Charles Stafford |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Education has been an important part of the nation-building process in mainland China and Taiwan. In this interview, Charles Stafford, a specialist in the anthropology of these regions, maps out the links between education, popular religion, family loyalty and nation in Taiwan. In an attempt to counteract the "superstitious practices" of popular religion that suffuse Taiwanese life, the government has pointed children to the classroom for their lessons in morality. But, as Stafford argues, the unconscious training that occurs as part of everyday life can be a much more effective teacher than formal education. |
Fathom: What does education mean in Taiwan? |
Charles Stafford: Although it is a truism that Chinese people place great emphasis on education and learning--and, by extension, that Taiwanese people should place a similar weight on learning--if you look through history, the emphasis given to education and schooling has varied an awful lot. In Taiwan, in the second half of the twentieth century, education became incredibly important. This was partly because the state placed a great emphasis on schooling and education as part of the nation-building project. |
From the popular point of view, education became very important, because during a period of rapid economic growth, schooling was seen as one way to advance oneself in the world. So families were great supporters of education, because it was seen as a way of getting ahead in the world. For those reasons, education has been terribly important in Taiwan, but I don't think we can assume from this that Chinese people always value education. In fact, it changes a lot. |
Fathom: What are the differences in education policy and practice and in attitudes toward learning between China and Taiwan? |
Stafford: The biggest difference between education in Taiwan and education in China is that in mainland China there is still a terrific aftershock from the Cultural Revolution, from the period of time when education was not just devalued but when explicit attempts were made to destroy the traditional bases of Chinese education and learning and to really undermine the authority of intellectuals and of schooling. That had terrific effects, and although it took place over a relatively short period of time (about 10 years), the impact has been much more extreme than a lot of people imagine. |
This is partly because Chinese academia was very much cut off from global academia for some time. By contrast, in Taiwan the interaction with global academia was very intense during precisely the same period. For many of these years, most of the Taiwanese elite ended up--or at least their children ended up--in the United States doing Ph.D.s at Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford and so on. So in many ways there are terrific differences between education in these two places in spite of their shared cultural traditions. |
Fathom: So would you say that education is distinct from cultural influences and tradition? |
Stafford: In broader terms, this is a question of the relationship between formal education, formal schooling and institutions and the kind of informal "training up" in a cultural tradition that happens as a part of everyday life. This is something that is written about quite a bit in anthropology and in other disciplines as well. In some ways, that study is complicated by the fact that we really don't know very much about how learning actually takes place. This is the kind of thing that people are starting to get to grips with only now. |
One of the interesting things that is said in some of that research is that while the kind of formal institutionalised education that we think of as being educational (lectures and so on) is good for teaching particular kinds of things to certain kinds of people about particular kinds of subjects, in fact the sort of informal, sometimes unconscious training that takes place in everyday life is more effective at teaching particular kinds of concepts, ideas and modes of practice. That distinction is a very interesting and important one: the one between education and tradition. |
Fathom: How important is education in Taiwanese family life? |
Stafford: Certainly in the last 50 years, formal education has been terribly important, partly because it is seen as a route to personal advancement. People place a great emphasis on the schooling of their children. Parents are usually very happy when they see that their children are spending a lot of time not just reading books but also writing characters. In the Chinese tradition, it is seen as a great indication that students are working hard if they are sitting there writing characters. But simultaneously, I think, parents place a great emphasis on the unspoken traditions that are part of everyday family life. Obviously, that depends a lot on how traditionalist a particular family is, but I think it is very important for families that their children are seen to be adopting the kind of morality that the parents themselves already have. In general, we can say that they take both kinds of learning or training very seriously indeed. |
Fathom: What are the differences between the typical morality of Taiwanese education and the everyday morality of Taiwanese family life? |
Stafford: Probably the biggest difference, or the place in which the biggest difference can be seen, is in relation to attitudes towards religion. This is something that has changed in the last 10 or 15 years with the liberalisation of Taiwan, but if you look back 10 or 15 years, the state and, by extension, the national education mistrusted religion. Religion was seen to be a superstitious practice, something left over from the past that was holding back Taiwanese and Chinese modernisation. Religion was seen as a bad thing. Morality was something you could learn about in school; you didn't need to go to temples or consult with spirit mediums in order to learn proper morality. |
The viewpoint of families, especially families in the countryside and more traditional families, is obviously very different. For a lot of those families, the true and genuine morality is to be found in religious practice and ancestral observances, but also in the practices of popular Buddhism and Taoism. So there was a conflict between what was being taught in the schools and what was being taught in families in terms of morality, although I am not certain that it was a conflict that people very often recognised--it was more implicit than explicit |
Fathom: Is it possible or indeed useful to relate family, nation and learning? |
Stafford: It is certainly possible, and I would argue that it is very useful and that is partly because, in mainland China and in Taiwan, education has been a very important part of the nation-building project. For Communists in mainland China and nationalists in Taiwan, education has been a real priority. It has been a priority partly in order to somehow pull children away a little bit from their families, to make them loyal to their nation instead of simply being loyal to their families. Again, I'm not certain that everyone in Taiwan and China would see it that way, but from the outside that is the view I take. |
Therefore, education has played an important role in modern Chinese history, and through education we can see that very complicated link between kinship, on the one hand, and family life and nationalism and nation building on the other. So the impact has been rather important, and education continues to be an important part not only of family life but of nationalist projects now in the twentieth century. |
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