Seminar: Taiwan's Modern Education

I began auditing a three-hour graduate seminar on Taiwan's modern Education (近代台灣教育史) at the National Taiwan Normal University 國立師範大學 on Tuesday. Ten master's students (mostly of Institute of Taiwan History at National Taiwan Normal University) and one visiting master's student from Kyoto University 京都大学 have become my new classmates. The adviser of the student from Kyodai is prominent in studying education in Japanese-colonized Taiwan. I need to befriend him and read more of his adviser's research before I go to Japan next year.

This is the class structure. One student presents readings each week, and other students are expected to provide more comments and questions. The class is less of a discussion that I am familiar with at UC Santa Cruz, but more of a student report with critique of the student, supplemental information, and lecture from the professor. Students are reading both Chinese and Japanese literature and Japanese primary documents. The class focuses on analyzing the relationship between schools (學校) and the locale (地方). Students are expected to complete a research paper on the topic of education before the semester ends in February. They have begun to give weekly progress report yesterday. From them, I have learned about different sources and topics that I can explore for my project.

The instructor of the class is very knowledgeable. Professor Hsu Pei-hsien 許佩賢 has worked on the history of modern education in Taiwan during the Japanese period for years. I recently finished reading her book, Modern Schools of Colonial Taiwan (殖民地台灣的近代學校), a collection of essays on the topic. Her book focuses on primary schools and their impact on local society and people as well as ideas behind primary education (young citizenship 少國民). Although I have yet sat down with her to discuss my project, I need to do that once I have made some progress in my research.