Roots of liberal studies

This article first appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition on Apr 29, 2013 as "June 4 raises liberal studies issue".

The liberal studies exam in this year's Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education examination, under way until early next month, contained the previously taboo topic of the June 4 crackdown in Tiananmen Square. It caught some by surprise. But then, a sense of bewilderment surrounded the whole idea of liberal education.

"How can liberal education be a course?" was a question many of us raised years ago. Isn't it a way of learning? A way of training? A thing that belongs to college (meaning undergraduate) education? How is it to be defined, anyway?

These are legitimate questions, and I do not propose to deal with them in one column. But I believe they are important to the future of this community, so I'll try to explain. But first, let me clarify the "state of confusion" we are facing today.

Part of the problem stems from the very term "liberal education" and its Chinese translation. The University of Hong Kong has a lib ed department and calls it tongshi in Putonghua. At Chinese University, the tong shi department is called "general education" in English. At the University of Science and Technology, they don't have a department, only a few electives taken as tongshi. At Lingnan University, the lib ed programme is called by a different, but appropriate name - boya. In Taiwan, it's called tongshi, but on the mainland, the term most often used is suzhi (literally, quality education).

Each university, therefore, has its own approach, and although each is doing its best under the present system, it's far from desirable. Lib ed is being defined arbitrarily because there is no consensus on what it is. What's more, it also tells us - so it seems - that most of us, including those in the higher education sector, don't know what lib ed really is. It's hard to blame them, though. Just a few decades ago, we had never heard of such a term.

Even after we have borrowed the concept from American higher education, we pay it only lip service. The phrase tongshi is high sounding, but the people who started these programmes at our colleges never received proper lib ed training themselves.

To have a better understanding of what it truly is, let's go back further to the roots of the story.

Modern liberal education, known as liberal arts education in the United States, is an American phenomenon, though its heritage comes from the Renaissance of 15th-century Europe. To bypass learning institutions controlled by the Roman Catholic church, secular scholars in Italy created studia humanitatis, which is Latin for the studies of human knowledge. The subjects were rhetoric, history, mathematics and astronomy, logic and philosophy, and Latin. For the next five centuries, knowledge of those subjects was the basis to judge whether a person was cultivated.

But classical culture was also involved, as people believed the works of philosophers Aristotle (ancient Greece) and Cicero (ancient Rome) were vital, as that's how one learned to read and write, and to have morality and wisdom. That's how they nurtured a people with "liberal" learning.

是因為背了

(載〈蘋果日報〉2013年04月08日論壇版)

日前，與出版社總編輯共膳。席間，談起他準備進幼稚園的兒子，在家中怎樣輕鬆地背誦唐詩。有沒有唸口簧成分？也許有。但何妨？我們小時候讀「三字經」，「千字文」，何曾明解？還不是日後才「反芻」，重新咀嚼的？如果幼時不記下，一天長大了，希望吐出重新理解，也辦不到的。

今天，不少父母認為，你要我的小孩背書，即是要他們「死記」，沒有教他們理解。讀書應該明理，不該死記。那是假定了背誦是囫圇吞棗，不經咀嚼的。使老師強制學生背書，又不給他們講解課文，那是老師的失職。很難想像，這是一般老師的作法。從「岳飛字鵬舉」到「臣本布衣躬耕於南陽」，有哪一課是老師不解課文的？

多年來，不少家長跟我說，他們不擔心兒女考試，卻不明白為什麼辭彙那麼貧乏，成語典故無法信手拿來，應用在作文上。我問：又不要背書，又不看課外書，終日與機為伍，你能怎樣？都無以對。

記得當年學文學導論，一位本科教授引經據典，莎翁十四行詩背出，那流利，那鏗鏘悅耳，教大家五體投地，佩服極了。後來他告我們，功力，是練出來的；能出口成文，因為他年輕時參加演劇，諸多詩文妙句，都靠牢記。不背何來？

有外國學成回來的教授，說詩人萬中無一，你要的資料，網上找尋十分便利，隨手一翻就到，何必浪費時間背誦？那是假設了千百年來的經典文章，詩詞歌賦，就像統計用的資料，只須查找，不必記憶的。

可文化傳承，尤其豐厚的文化傳統，並不是機械營運。一個社會，要百姓具有最起碼的運用和鑑賞能力，使他們有最基本的文化素養，就不能把活的遺產看作「一批資料」而已。

還有。背誦，不只能使人記得牢，更可使人明白文字韻律之美。就是最簡單的唐詩元曲，得琅琅上口，感覺全不一樣。你能背出馬致遠的《秋思》，你就知道什麼叫詩畫。中國文字音樂感特別強。不訓練背誦，怎樣捕捉它？

最愛用的例子，是「床前明月光」。告年輕同學：我給上句，你接下句，接對有獎。說「床前明月光」。差不多全班都爭着舉手，因為都接得上。我問：你何以接得上？然後人人明白。

是因為背了。

Edward Chen's liberal arts dream is still alive

(Printed on South China Morning Post, 1 April 2013)

More than a decade ago, Professor Edward Chen Kwan-yiu was appointed president of Lingnan University. In a press conference, he announced that Lingnan was to be a liberal arts college different from the others locally. Many people in the education field were excited.

Chen has since retired from that position and is now an honorary professor at the University of Hong Kong. He probably didn't achieve his aim at Lingnan, at least in the eyes of those who do not believe in "outcome-based" evaluations to judge performance.

Almost a year and a half ago, Chen wrote a book review in which he not only told us what the author thought, but also what he himself thought.

He used a rhetorical title: "Why should we care about liberal arts education?" To say "why should we care" implies either that we don't care, or we don't care enough. So there's a lot for us to digest.

Structurally speaking, if we want a genuine liberal arts college, then we would have to build a small, residential and highly student-orientated institution.

The distinctive feature of that institution would be an emphasis not on professional/vocational training, but on the teaching and learning process.

That process leans heavily on a teaching-focused approach, which is regarded as more important than the content. Most of our universities today, of course, pay no attention to this.

According to Chen, interaction, interdisciplinary studies, intracurricular activities, and international horizon are the four I's that embody that process. Interactions between students and teachers in the pursuit of knowledge, inside and outside the classroom, are frequent. Student-professor relations are close.

Interdisciplinary courses offered as seminars are important - not just multidisciplinary, but cross-disciplinary. This is possible because class sizes are small and teachers are more dedicated. This is not easy in a large university, where professors work more like manufacturers than devoted nurturers.

In a small residential environment, student activities can be related to the curricula, and thereby provide experiential learning.

Small colleges can also engage students more easily in international exchange.

We can say that Chen's criteria have not been matched by any of our institutions. His dream lives on.