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Love is in the air: Lifting the taboo on love
September 27, 2004
Love is in the air. Now it is also in the mainland's public school curriculum.
Determined to get the jump on teenage hormones, educators in Shanghai have
unveiled a textbook that features a chapter on the nature of romantic love - a
topic that has long been taboo in the country's socially conservative
educational system.
The chapter, titled Love Is Like a Song, is part of a new, ninth-grade Chinese
language textbook being introduced in Shanghai, starting this year with 20
middle schools.
It includes one letter, two poems and two longer literary selections, including
a passage from the classic English novel Jane Eyre, aimed at encouraging
students to take a "more rational" approach to the swirling emotions they will
feel as they go through puberty, chief editor of the volume, Fan Shougang,
said.
"We want them to understand that love is beautiful. Love is not superficial.
Love needs good understanding of its meaning. And love needs preparation," Fan
said.
"We warn them about the danger of rushing into it," he added. "We try to
encourage them not to try it out at an early age."
Caveats aside, the love chapter has created a ruckus in the media and among
some parents, who worry that it might give their children ideas.
Unlike in the United States, where school crushes are a part of growing up and
singer, Donny Osmond, still croons about puppy love on oldie stations, the
Chinese take a dim view of what they call "early love".
Fearful that teenage romance will turn serious students into lip-locked dolts,
parents and teachers have enforced a strict cultural silence surrounding early
love as part of an overall strategy to prevent fraternisation between the
maturing sexes.
Even some colleges force married students to live apart while they are
enrolled.
Sometimes, the result of all this Chinese-style puritanism has been downright
tragic.
In one recent case, newspapers reported that a 13-year-old girl killed herself
by drinking rat poison because her grandmother tried to prevent her from
falling in love.
But as the country has opened itself to the more expressive - and sex-laden -
influences of Western advertising and entertainment, young couples have become
increasingly demonstrative in public, walking hand-in-hand down busy shopping
streets.
Xi Yuecheng, a serious minded eighth-grader from the Shanghai area, said she
looks forward to hearing what the textbook has to offer when it is introduced
to her school next year.
The 14-year-old said: "On TV, there are a lot of actors and actresses from Hong
Kong and Taiwan dramas and they're always talking about love," Xi said. "I need
to understand love ... and I hope to learn about it from the textbook."
This new attitude comes as statistics indicate that the current wave of teens
are hitting puberty about a year earlier than did students 15 years ago,
reflecting a worldwide trend, director of the Juvenile Research Institute of
the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Yang Xiong, said. Today's
middle-school students are experiencing what Yang called a "relatively earlier
sexualisation".
Meanwhile, Chinese educators and their textbooks previously had been stuck in a
"backward" approach, he added.
About the only mention of romance in former textbooks was a widely repeated
story called Revolutionary Love, Yang recalled.
The tale described two communist cadres who fall in love during the days of
struggle before the 1949 "liberation", get arrested and arrange to be secretly
married the day they are executed.
By comparison, the new ninth-grade textbook represents a kinder, gentler
approach to love, as well as a giant step forward in reaching today's youth,
Yang said.
"You need to guide them in the right way in order to make sure they don't have
to rely on the rebel stuff on the Internet, to make sure they have healthy and
safe attitudes about love," he said.
Fan, a senior editor at the Shanghai Education Publishing House, said it took a
year to winnow 100 potential entries to the five now featured in the 18-page
chapter.
It includes a letter by Russian educator Vasily Sukhomlinsky; a poem by Russian
great Alexander Pushkin; a passage by Su Tong, of Raise the Red Lantern fame;
and a fiery excerpt from Emily Bronte's Jane Eyre, in which the title character
speaks passionately about the desire for equality in her relationship with Mr
Rochester.
A poem by modern Chinese writer Shu Ting compares love to the intertwined roots
and separate trunks of trees.
The readings are accompanied by exercises that ask students to summarise what
it takes to love somebody (answer: responsibility, respect, sharing the ups and
downs), to collect a few love stories and to give their opinions on Internet
romances. The chapter, Fan said, grew out of a nationwide effort to rewrite
school curricula so that they fit the psychological needs and general interests
of students.
He said the text, destined for all Shanghai middle schools by 2008, may be
tweaked slightly but will continue to stress the need for loyalty and equality
in true love.
"And we hope to do it in a prudent way," he said.
Which is all quite acceptable by Gu Lujun, a 15-year-old boy who like most
adolescent males seemed a bit uncomfortable when asked to ponder the need for
love, at least in his Chinese language book.
Gu said he saw the value of including "all this love-related stuff" to help a
student develop his personality, but added that he "did not want too much of
it" in the book.
The reason? A decidedly unromantic one.
"It's not going to be in the examination," he said.
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