Introduction

Summary

This book is about education. However, forgetting that for a moment, imagine a situation in which children already knew most of what they are taught, having learnt it while it was not being taught to them. In which case, a book about education would become a complicated thing to write. Everything that presented itself as educational would have to be understood as something else again.

Angang is a fishing community, a rural township (xiang) in southeastern Taiwan, and a place in which formal education seems of obvious importance, a central concern of daily life. Clamorous student rituals echo off the surrounding hills and down onto the villages, children spend entire days in school-related tasks, and many adults follow with interest events inside the school compounds. At times, the daily and seasonal routines of the community seem as geared to the requirements of learning as they do to fishing, or to the complicated demands of the lunar calendar.

One morning in Angang I saw an elementary school student, the daughter of one of the richest men in a local village, pulling a cardboard box towards the kitchen of her family home. I asked where she was going and, with what seemed to be a look of satisfaction, she replied: shao keben!, ‘To burn textbooks!’ I wanted to know more, but she had no further comment on the subject, silently and unceremoniously placing her books in the stove. This calm act of incineration came soon after the end of the examination period, during which even very young students in Taiwan are exhorted by parents and by themselves to chenggong, ‘succeed’ in their exams. Perhaps she had had enough.