4 - Textbook mothers and frugal children

Summary

This account of learning in Angang began with textbooks burnt in the home of the Stove God. Now I return to these books which are read and reread, and which prompt local people to say ‘the more you read, the more it makes you crazy!’ Here I will thus move away from descriptions of learning contexts, towards the content of what children are taught in schools, and specifically to the moral content of the textbooks they read. But why examine this morality which, in any case, is viewed as commonsensical? In part because it is not as obvious as it first appears to be. However the point is not so much the moral issues themselves, as their relation to crucial questions of identity. Why, then, look for this morality in textbooks, and not somewhere else? There are several reasons for doing so.

First, because textbooks are a reasonable guide to the explicit content of schooling. Due to the competitive nature of education in Taiwan, examinations are of fundamental concern. Examination questions are, in turn, based directly on textbooks, and teachers are expected, above all, to prepare students for their exams. Textbooks thus present a reliable (if incomplete) outline of what is taught in the classroom. Beyond this, it is observably true that children in Taiwan read and study the texts intensively over a period of many years. I make no assumptions about what they learn during that process, but there is no denying that students in Angang, even the least accomplished, are repeatedly exposed to whatever is represented in textbooks.