The Teaching of Literary Chinese

Abstract

T HE teaching of Chinese at most American colleges and universities is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the Second World War, the few institutions providing regular instruction owed their programs to the efforts of individual scholars, whose personal abilities and research interests tended to determine the way the language was taught. During the past fifteen years, private foundations, which had previously given valuable aid to the work of individual scholars, have supported large undertakings designed to extend the teaching of Chinese, and the federal government has entered the field on an ambitious scale. The result has been the rapid growth of established programs, and the inclusion of Chinese in the curriculum of an ever increasing number of centers of higher learning.' Unfortunately, however, this expansion in the facilities for the study of Chinese has too often been accompanied by a stress upon objectives in language training which are quite at variance with the central objectives of teaching and research in American higher education. Instruction in modern European languages has generally been integrated with these aims, but the character of the newly created Chinese programs and the type of courses added to the curriculum of older centers have often been determined by the interests emphasized by some foundations and by the government, as well as by the limitations of the abilities of a readily recruitable staff. These latter considerations bear little relation either to the nature of the educational goals of a particular college or university or to the general needs of contemporary scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. It is time to take a long and serious look at the role of a comprehensive Chinese language program, not only as a means of furthering the national interest in the face of a particular international situation, but as an integral part of the effort to transmit and expand human knowledge