Why should traditional Chinese education be promoted?
Simplified Chinese characters have been used for decades. At this year’s National Two Sessions, 21 CPPCC members from the literary and artistic circles, including Yu Junjian, Song Zuying, Huang Hong, and Guan Mucun, jointly submitted a document on "Additional Primary Schools" "Proposal for Traditional Chinese Character Education" recommends that traditional Chinese character education be set up in primary schools to pass on the roots of Chinese culture. (Southern Metropolis Daily, March 13)
Such a proposal is a useful supplement to the current simplified Chinese characters. In the early days of the founding of New China, the emergence of simplified Chinese characters played a major role in eliminating illiteracy and improving the quality of the people. However, there were certain problems with the simplification of Chinese characters at that time. For example, some Chinese characters adopted the "homophone merging" principle based on pinyin as the standard, merging different traditional Chinese characters with the same pronunciation into one simplified character. This caused us to understand the simplified version of classical Chinese. It's easy to go wrong. Some have also simplified the essence of traditional Chinese characters. For example, the traditional Chinese characters for "kin" and "爱" are masterpieces of Chinese character creation. After simplification, they become "relatives but not seeing, love but no heart". , it’s a pity. A problem that cannot be ignored is that with the increasingly frequent exchanges between the two sides, mainlanders only recognize simplified Chinese characters but not traditional Chinese characters, which has caused many inconveniences in communication between the two sides. At the Academy Awards last year, Jane Zhang did not recognize the traditional Chinese character "Zou" or "国" when awarding the award, which made her very embarrassed. Mr. Deng Guangming once told a joke that someone went to the Peking University Library to borrow "Hanshu", but the administrator said he didn't have it because he didn't know "Hanshu" in traditional Chinese. More importantly, not knowing traditional Chinese characters has a certain impact on inheriting traditional culture and exploring local cultural resources. There is a certain gap between the Chinese people today and Chinese classical books, and it is really a pity that they cannot make effective use of ancient books. Luo Yuming, a professor of Chinese at Fudan University, believes that "the articles written by Chinese people now are all rough, and they cannot appreciate Chinese characters in a fine and exquisite way, and they cannot express and use Chinese characters accurately." Although this evaluation is somewhat arbitrary, it reflects to a certain extent the embarrassing situation that the Chinese people do not inherit enough of their own traditions. Although the author has a bachelor's degree in medicine, he is basically unable to read through the ancient Chinese medical classics. I often feel that it is a pity that the education we received at that time did not include education in traditional Chinese characters. This regret cannot continue to exist in the next generation.
If Chinese people want to inherit their traditions, not forget their national roots, and fully develop their own national culture, they must not turn a blind eye to education in traditional Chinese characters. Some people may refute that Oracle Bone Inscriptions are the ancestor of Chinese writing. Why don’t you learn Oracle Bone Inscriptions in order to inherit the culture? For researchers, oracle bone inscriptions are naturally necessary, but for ordinary Chinese, most traditional cultural resources are still written in mature traditional Chinese characters. The two are different and cannot be compared.
Traditional Chinese character education should become a kind of public knowledge. We attach so much importance to English education, why not pay attention to traditional Chinese character education? As for whether it must start from elementary school, I don’t think so. First, it will cause primary school students to be unable to understand, second, it will increase the learning burden, and third, it will cause unnecessary cognitive confusion. Our country's basic education generally only includes classical Chinese from middle school. Therefore, in order to ensure the authenticity of the culture, it is best to use the traditional version of classical Chinese. As for whether it is elective or compulsory, there is no need to apply it one-size-fits-all. It can be based on the specific conditions of each school. Regarding.
In short, the promotion of traditional Chinese character education is not to revolutionize simplified characters, but to supplement simplified characters. It is not to turn traditional characters back into the mainstream. After all, the development of Chinese characters, from seal script to regular script, What we follow is the principle of simplification. On the basis of this general principle, wouldn't it be better if we learn some traditional Chinese characters to make the culture more inclusive, broaden our horizons, and become a bridge for us to communicate with traditional culture?