Learning opportunities present themselves every day, most importantly when our standards and values are challenged. The growth mindset requires that we confront what we often take for granted to be the standard and to be true and fair. Life is simpler in absolutes – everything is clear, judgment is easy and there is no room for ambiguity.
The problem with that, of course, is that life isn’t simple. Reality is complex, full of grey areas where nuance and context make life more interesting. Funnelling everything into an absolute binary grinder ignores the possibilities and alternatives.
Those of us with children at primary school, especially in Hong Kong’s local system, understand how challenging it is t…
Learning opportunities present themselves every day, most importantly when our standards and values are challenged. The growth mindset requires that we confront what we often take for granted to be the standard and to be true and fair. Life is simpler in absolutes – everything is clear, judgment is easy and there is no room for ambiguity.
The problem with that, of course, is that life isn’t simple. Reality is complex, full of grey areas where nuance and context make life more interesting. Funnelling everything into an absolute binary grinder ignores the possibilities and alternatives.
Those of us with children at primary school, especially in Hong Kong’s local system, understand how challenging it is to switch between the worlds of reality and rigidity. One tiny stroke of a Chinese character not written in the exact angle and length, for example, would be wrong. And as much as the educators say education is about learning, not just scores, we know that getting good grades can be everything to students.
Do we want them to get the line absolutely right or do we want them to really learn the character? As in, its meaning, how it came to be and what it inspired, because the beauty of the Chinese language and its characters is quite literally an art form – richly visual, given its pictographic origins. And the construction of characters using radicals that make up the sounds and meanings of the words. How characters convey abstract concepts in their striking visual form can take comprehension to much higher and deeper levels.
For instance, a character like 道 (dao) can be more than just a road; it can mean a journey that one must be fully and mentally engaged in. It can translate as “the way” or “the path” – the essence of profound thinking in Chinese philosophy, the self-existent, formless yet eternal source of all existence: the way, the truth and the life.
But for Chinese characters to be legible, it is also about the length, angle and position of strokes and lines, and the space between them. It perfectly illustrates the reality of education in Hong Kong, the need for students and parents in Hong Kong to conform to the rigidness of the system. Hence the controversy over Shatin Government Primary School allowing its students to use simplified Chinese in tests and examinations.
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Cantonese or Mandarin? A debate in Hong Kong education since 2008
Cantonese or Mandarin? A debate in Hong Kong education since 2008