Educating the Young

        There was this M A level course ‘principles of Chinese culture’ offered by the City University of Hong Kong.  To make sure that students from up north could enjoy the same benefit, the Department made it a two-semester event, having the Cantonese session in the first semester, and the Mandarin one in the second.  All things considered, it cannot be said to be inconsiderate.

      A few students from across the border enrolled in the first session, then demanded the session be converted into Mandarin speaking; for, they claimed, they could not understand Cantonese.  Some local students disagreed, and a row erupted.  It was the Dean who intervened and settled the dispute.  Whether he handled the situation with a prudent measure is not my concern here; what interests me is the education phenomenon in front of us.

      It is not just an institutional phenomenon because it involves how our students conduct themselves, or deeper yet, it shows how we have trained our youth.  One reason they provided was that using Cantonese as the medium of instruction discriminated against them.  Is it true?  Under the circumstances, giving a double offering seems reasonable enough.  The discrimination argument does not seem to be persuasive to most.

      Another one, which they believed had more substance, goes something like this.  To graduate in summer, you need to complete all requirements by the end of the second semester.  So, you’d free up all possible time slots to fill in what you need to carry in the last term.  To make it easy for yourself, you’d try to get rid of ‘all other stuff’ by the end of the first.  That certainly benefits the person planning to leave school soon, but it causes all kinds of inconvenience to others.  In most cases, universities usually do not modify their set procedures only to make it easy for the few.

      And if that be labelled discriminatory, we may well ask: What is non-discrimination then?  Should the institution cancel all her Cantonese sessions and convert them all into Mandarin ones?  Would that be reasonable? (We are of course discussing as a matter of principle, not on the status of any linguistic form.) Would that be advantageous to the majority who do not speak Mandarin?

      Shortly after the incident, there were debates between the netizens themselves.  A university friend from Guangzhou sent me a note with this comment: When in Rome, do as the Romans do.  A cliché?  Yes.  It makes sense, does it not?  The question is: I’m sure those guys understood this well; so why didn’t they follow through?  That, my friend believes, comes from a superiority complex, a sense of arrogance as it were.  That arrogance, that special-privilege attitude, she says, is nurtured by a social atmosphere prevalent in many places in China today.  People become egotistic, very self-centred, have no regards for others’ concerns and feelings.

      If we care to look further, we see the similar phenomenon happening not just on campus, but outside of it; not just in Hong Kong, but almost everywhere in the world.  One of those students was interviewed afterwards, at which occasion he said he should have more privilege because he paid a higher fee than his local classmates.  I wonder what he would have said had he entered a state college in the US, say, UCLA, without being able to pay in-state.

      Comparing with the ‘Roman’ idiom, the Chinese parallel actually goes one step more.  It says literally like this: when you enter a village, you follow the custom (i.e. mores) of the villagers; when you enter a place, you beware of the taboos of the place.  And that has been a part of the social teaching for God knows how long.  It has not changed despite all the upheavals, all the revolutions, all the comings and goings of dynasties.  Now, apparently, we are not educating our youngsters as we should be, we have failed to train them a very basic tenet in social living.  No need to look afar, just look at how our young people behave here, and we can see we can’t really laugh at others.

      It may do our parents and teachers some good if they really reflect on this.