Peking University, March 13, 2017: “Traditional culture education has been Peking University’s convention”, said Ge XiaoYin firstly when talking about traditional culture education. Ge is a professor of Department of Chinese Language andLiterature at PKU and member of the national committee of CPPCC.
Traditional culture education and research have been well-conducted at PKU for over 20 years. In the curriculum of science students, University-level Chinese has been included as a compulsory course, not to mention the curriculum of art students at PKU, where many courses about traditional culture are available.
The progress has not always been smooth. “I started lecturing on ancient Chinese more than 20 years ago,” Ge said, “The textbooks were not well developed then and some ancient sentences were in short of annotations. As a result, professors who taught those courses had to do the entire translation and annotation by themselves.” Now, the schedules and textbooks of University-level Chinese are “solely designed and arranged by PKU faculty”, said Ge.
There are also many poetry clubs on campus started by students spontaneously over 20-30 years ago. Inspired by the environment of traditional culture, many students treat poetry learning and writing as an amateur. Some also favor poetry of ancient styles. It is a common thing to read dozens of poetry written by those students in their clubs’ own poetry journals. “In recent years, we have also opened courses on poetry writing, painting and calligraphy to give better guidance for students in these areas.” Ge said. In her perspective, traditional culture education is essential and good to students.“Those wonderful ancient articles and wisdom greatly help students to develop right outlook and values on life.” Ge added.
Written by: Su Lan
Edited by: Yan Shengnan
