Global Perspectives on Spirituality and Education by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

13 Life Education in Contemporary Chinese Societies

Ngar-sze Elsa Lau

INTRODUCTION

In a classroom of a secondary school in Beijing, most students are deeply moved to tears while they are watching a video of childbirth, captured at hospital by another student. Having never imagined the difficulty and physical suffering of a mother, the students are amazed with joy when the small new life starts crying loudly on the vivid screen (Yuan Wang, 2004). After the lesson, these adolescents started making sense of their lives and understanding the meaning of respecting their parents and valuing the lives of others.

This is one example of ‘life education’ (LE) (shengming jiaoyu) teaching activities promoted in mainland China. LE has been gradually promoted and recognised in the last two decades as a formal or informal curriculum with the aims of preventing campus violence and suicide in Chinese societies among ‘two shores, four places’ (liangan sidi). ‘Two shores’ (liangan) refers to mainland China and Taiwan, while ‘four places’ (sidi) includes the ‘two shores’, Hong Kong and Macao. Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao are geographically closely located but diverse given the historical, political, social and religious development in the last century. Nevertheless, similar social crises among children and adolescents caused by modernisation and globalisation have occurred in these Chinese societies. Common concerns about the challenges in education and society have provided opportunities for educators from the ‘four places’ to interact on the curriculum and pedagogy of LE.

Religious education has never been implemented as a statutory policy in these Chinese societies due to cultural, historical and political conditions. We may ask, then: How can LE relate to the spiritual needs of students? This chapter discusses the development of LE in the Chinese societies in ‘two shores, four places’ and how LE curriculum, particularly in Taiwan and mainland China, is related to spirituality in building resilience.

DEVELOPMENT OF ‘LIFE EDUCATION’ IN ‘TWO SHORES, FOUR PLACES’

Taiwan

After taking over Taiwan1 in 1949, the Nationalist Party of China (Kuomingtang) effectively implemented social policies with the political and financial support of the United States. The success of industrialisation beginning in the 1960s, especially in information technology, led to rapid economic growth in Taiwan, one of the four ‘Asian Dragons’. Yet social problems created by alienation have emerged gradually, similar to those in most developed countries. Less government control of institutionalised religions has resulted in the gradual flourishing of Daoism, Buddhism and Christianity. Nevertheless, due to complex historical and political factors from early in the 20th century, since the Nationalist Party moved to Taiwan, religious education has never been launched in public schools. Religious education or religious rituals are permitted in private religious schools, but forcing students or teachers to join any religious rituals is forbidden by law (Shihangqing, 2002).

Since the mid-1990s there has been increasing number of students almost addicted to computer games and indulging in drugs, sex and violence. Negative incidents, such as the suicides of some top achieving female school students, aroused much attention in society, and in 1999, suicide was the third major cause of death among youth, following cancer and violence.

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