A Practical Redefinition of Chinoy Education vs. the "Good Old" Si-Thak Days
If you're a Chinoy millennial or perhaps a boomer, I would say these books were more of a symbol of trauma. I can exonerate the Chinese teachers (called siansi in Hokkien) but not the system. The lesson wasn't the siansi's fault. That's what I would tell my fellow Chinoys when we talk, we raise the problem. Whether it was Bethany Christian School, Philippine Christian Gospel School, the now-defunct Samantabhadra Institute, or Cebu Eastern College (where the school shooting threat occurred recently), the problem was often that they relied on si-thak, an overemphasis on rote memorization.
The traditional Chinese classroom in the Chinoy school can be a horror story
I remember the classic escalation of strict teachers that happened. Grade 1 Siansi was strict. Grade 2 Siansi was stricter than Grade 1 Siansi. Grade 3 Siansi was even stricter than Grade 2 Siansi. I remember the Grade 3 Siansi was so fierce that she got nicknamed Siansi Fierce by some students. In my memory, I had a classmate (won't mention his name) who repeated Grade 2 Chinese four times. I had another classmate in Grade 2 Chinese who was three years in the same classroom. The school tried to remedy this by stating that if a student failed twice in the same level, they would no longer accept the student. It was called the retention policy. In fact, Grades 2-3 were often the bottleneck when one strict teacher was succeeded by an even stricter teacher. I can even remember that Grade 3 Siansi had a louder voice than the Grade 2 Siansi. Our Grade 4 siansi was even called Siansi Minus because she would frequently say in Hokkien, "I will deduct points, ha!" I found Grade 4 siansi to be the strictest. However, some say that the Grade 6 siansi was the strictest one. Even the Grade 2 Siansi said, "You're finally under the strictest siansi!, referring to the Grade 6 siansi.
The Chinese classroom was often under a lifeless scenario. I'm not going to dismiss everything that the Grade 2 Siansi said. Honestly, for whatever flaws she had, she was but another victim of the si-thak Chinese system. I remember she said about how Chinese is getting spoken worldwide. However, given that she was born probably after the Second World War, the Philippines was a war-torn country. In fact, one can think about the Retail Trade Act of 1954 under Ramon Magsaysay and the Filipino First Policy under Carlos P. Garcia. Being a Chinese settler in the Philippines, especially for those who left China for a better living in the Philippines (back during the boom), meant survival was of the essence. Grade 2 Siansi even told us that if we don't learn Chinese, we would just "drive a motorcycle" like somebody she knew.
The statement Grade 2 Siansi made no sense in the 1990s context. I don't remember family businesses requiring the store secretary to learn Lannang-ue (which literally means Our People's Language), which was a synonym for Philippine Hokkien. Jollibee, which I didn't know was owned by a Chinoy back in the day, because it called itself "At Home with the Filipino," didn't hire people into the office based on their fluency in Philippine Hokkien. This is informally known as the Xinyong Network (信用), which literally means Trust Network. From what I heard, the older Xinyong Network businesses may have hired and sold to Philippine huan-as (huan-a means barbarian back in the day, and later the term just means native) before the Mass Naturalization Act by Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. The move allowed several Chinese migrants to become legal Filipino citizens.
Now, when I think of Grade 2 Siansi's "ghost story", she probably lived in a certain area of Mindanao. She was probably from Butuan or Surigao. According to her, she knew somebody who didn't care about learning Lannang-Ue and ended up just "driving a motorcycle" as a consequence. She used that story to "scare us" into accepting the Si-Thak and getting the high grades needed. Yes, the problem of grading people based on how well they spit out memorized information, rather than understanding the context. However, this backfired because some people know the environment anyway, even as children. Several huan-a students often had parents who already had jobs here and there. Plus, the Chinoys are a minority, and Hokkien is even a minority language. Perhaps, my huan-a classmates from my previous school, despite their wrongness, were right about how adapting to the Philippines was necessary. I was still stubborn about it because it made no sense: "Pass your Filipino subject, but you're Chinese, not Filipino." At that point, I felt the Chinese Siansis were mentally stuck in a time period that had already passed away.
Not to mention that some students in the Chinese school were pulled out by their parents, as early as possible, to study in non-Chinese schools. It made me even think, "Wait, wasn't she the girl who always answered back at siansi?" Her parents moved her to a non-Chinese school, as evidenced by the uniform. Eventually, more and more of the exodus from Chinese schools to non-Chinese schools happened. The Chinese school system refused to adapt, still using Zhuyin (which is now an archaic language) while the world migrated to Pinyin, and they didn't realize the economics of opportunity loss. The system still insisted on the niche. They didn't look at learning Mandarin as something to be enjoyed. I tseemed that the old system relied on performative suffering. The reality is that performative suffering isn't the same as productive suffering.
In reality, this created an environment where Chinese was hated. This was ongoing, and honestly, I really wanted to move to the U.S. at that time.
Learning Mandarin in my college days, before I graduated under the K+10 system
- Tzong Hap (history) returned, but not in the dreadful method that I experienced. By teaching the history in English, people learned Chinese history for the first time. I remember how True/False exams required us to write True or False in Chinese. Instead of memorizing more bon toi (questions and answers in Chinese), we were actually answering them for real in our own words. This was an integration part, and honestly, we started by knowing Chinese history.
- The Hua Gu (Standard Chinese, 華語) portion was focused not on stories but on vocabulary, fill-in-the-blanks, and bon toi. Instead, we actually started learning Pinyin (which I tend to call Bopomofo) instead of Zhuyin. Any bon toi was treated as a new activity via meaningful mini-conversations.
- Chinese math was already out of the question. Only Chinese history and standard Chinese were focused on. But Chinese history was merely the start, as Chinese language learning was the focus.
The startling truth about the shift from performative hard work to productive hard work
When "Linda Walker" went ot Manila, I personally wanted to mock the si-thak apologists to try tallking to her. Can they even read Zhang Yingfei without thinking of the zh as a zh in English? Some people tend to read Pinyin at face value, even from those who survived the si-thak days!
The marketing mentor, Josiah Go, even presents this interview with Dr. Dory Poa. I would give an excerpt of her interview and give my reactions. I would highlight important points for understanding. It's said people are doomed to repeat history if they don't learn from it. In fact, this introduction by Dr. Poa makes a lot of sense, though the schools should remove Hokkien entirely:
Q1: What was your mandate when you assumed the presidency of Chiang Kai Shek College in 2013?A: I first joined Chiang Kai Shek College (CKS College) in January of 2013 as a consultant on curriculum reforms. One of the most immediate challenges that the College was facing then was the pressure to meet the requirement set forth by the Department of Education for all schools to be K+12 complaint by the year 2016. To make this happen without sacrificing the quality of education and without financially over-burdening our students and parents, I worked out a three-year transition program that was implemented when I assumed office as President in June of the school year 2013.CKS College has received a number of compliments from educators commending our Transition Program as one of the best K to 12 transition programs.When I assumed office in June 2013, the teaching of Chinese was also facing a great challenge. CKS College is a premiere Filipino-Chinese school that has been known for educating students who are fluent in at least four languages (English, Tagalog, Mandarin, and Hokkien). However, for some years there was a view within the Chinese community that graduates of this bilingual program were no longer fluent in Chinese. Furthermore, Chinese was becoming unpopular among students. I then put reforming the Chinese curriculum on the top of my agenda.Based on my experience as a language educator, and based on my previous experience and in my long term observation of the teaching of Chinese in Filipino-Chinese schools, I came to identify the core of the problem as the teaching approach and the teaching materials.Traditionally among the Filipino-Chinese schools in the Philippines, the teaching of Chinese was mainly the teaching of Mandarin, which was being taught as if it was the first language of the students, and the textbooks used were designed for first language learners. Yet Chinese in the Philippines are not native Mandarin speakers; their ancestors mainly originated from the Southern part of Fujian Province in China, where they speak a language known as Minnanhua (Southern Min, popularly known as Hokkien). Not only do they not speak Mandarin, most members of the younger generations are barely fluent in their ethnic language (Minnanhua/Hokkien), though the lingua franca in the Chinese community is still Minnanhua/Hokkien. Because of these factors, the teaching approach and materials were not suitable for them; they should be learning Mandarin as a second language if not as a foreign language. It was in this light that the present CKS Chinese Academic Curriculum Reform was developed.Starting with the beginning of the academic year in June, 2013, a series of drastic measures was undertaken to revolutionize Chinese language teaching at CKS College:1. changing the approach of teaching Chinese (Mandarin) to teaching it as a second language;2. replacing the Chinese language textbooks with modern updated versions suited for teaching Chinese as a second language;3. improving language instruction through the adoption of effective communicative language learning approaches such as the following:1. Video projects, to enable students to practice applying Mandarin more, increase their confidence in speaking Mandarin, nurture their creativity, and foster Information and Communications Technology (ICT) literacy in Chinese;2. Reader’s Theater, to allow students to practice speaking Mandarin and nurture their collaboration and leadership skills;3. Integrating Mandarin pop songs into the teaching of Mandarin, to increase learning satisfaction while reducing learning pressure and promoting students’ motivation and interest; and4. Picture books integrated with Chinese compositions, to decrease lexical gap problems and increase students’ creativity.4. promoting the learning of spoken Hokkien alongside the teaching/learning of Mandarin;5. giving more academic weight to the Mandarin/Hokkien subject by considering it as the subject for Mother Tongue learning within the new K+12 curriculum;6. developing and applying measurable approaches to assess and evaluate student performance;7. ensuring that all teachers are trained to use new academic technologies and resources through continuous seminar-workshops and training; and8. securing educational software to enhance and improve the quality of language teaching.The ultimate goal is to produce what I call “三文四語”(Sanwen Siyu) graduates, that is, graduates who can 1) read and write three languages: English, Pilipino and Chinese; and who can 2) speak four languages: English, Pilipino, Mandarin, and Hokkien. These four languages provide our students with more options in different existing job markets: local (Chinese community), national (general Filipino market), international (Greater China and ASEAN markets) and international (English speaking markets). The goal is to bring back the teaching of Chinese as a service to the community.Allow me to have a little longer explanation here:When the first Chinese school was founded, it was actually a monolingual school wherein the teaching was mainly in Hokkien (Southern Min), as the overwhelming majority of the Chinese in the Philippines is from the Southern part of Fujian Province. In addition to teaching students how to read and recite the traditional “Three Character Text” (三字經) in Hokkien, students were also taught how to write letters, as many of the pioneer immigrants could not read or write, and so the most sought after jobs at that time was as ghost letter writers. Later on they were also taught how to use the abacus, as most of these young immigrants needed to work in their parents’ businesses. When the Americans came, English was then added to the curriculum. In other words, the establishment of Chinese schools was to serve the community, to produce graduates who would be useful to the community.The situation changed after the founding of the Philippine Republic and also after the founding of the Republic of China. The focal point of the issue was citizenship. As we all know, the Philippines follows the principle of jus sanguinis (law of the blood), Chinese in the Philippines were all citizen of the Republic of China, and naturally, their schools were therefore put under the auspices of the Republic of China. The teachers, textbooks and teaching approaches were imported first from China, then later, Taiwan. In other words, Chinese schools in the Philippines at that time were branches of schools of the Republic of China. Not only were the textbooks and teaching approaches in line with the prescriptions of the Taiwan government, political activities and political slogans were also extended to all the Chinese schools in the Philippines. The teaching of Chinese was not to serve the needs of the local Chinese community anymore; the teaching of language had also transformed from the original monolingual Hokkien to bilingual Hokkien-Mandarin, and then later to monolingual Mandarin, following the practice in Taiwan at that time.At that time, the situation made sense, since most of the Chinese in the Philippines were citizens of the Republic of China. However, On 11 April 1975, a Philippine Presidential Decree was issued allowing Chinese and other foreigners living in the Philippines to be mass naturalised, and as a consequence, almost all Chinese in the Philippines became Filipino citizens ovenight.Mass naturalization of the Chinese in the Philippines was immediately followed by the Filipinization of all the Chinese schools. This should have been a good chance for the Chinese schools to be liberated from the control of a distant political institution, however, neither the Chinese community nor the Chinese educators were politically or psychologically ready to do that. Though Chinese classes were cut down to just two hours a day, and the textbooks were limited to the ones locally printed, the Chinese schools continued to teach Chinese in the same manner as before, treating their students as first language speakers. In other words, educators and Chinese community leaders continued to believe that they are still in a diaporic situation.
Definitely, there was this failure to adapt. In fact, this failure to adapt made people hate the Chinese subject. I even grew to hate myself for being Chinese, wishing I were born Caucasian. I even wanted to go to America and marry a nice blonde girl, discard my culture, and become a "genuine American". However, today, I could get married to a non-Chinese girl and still accept that I'm Chinese.
Now, for more real points, I'd like to also cite this one from Dr. Poa:
Q3: You also changed the Chinese Language textbooks, causing a controversy in the Chinese community then. Why was this change important? What has been the result since?
A: Yes, indeed it was quite a big step for CKS to take because the textbooks and the writing system are very much a cultural and political issue within the Chinese community. One columnist even criticized the reforms going on as an act of “cutting off our roots from our motherland.” Actually, I did not change the teaching of the writing system—we are still teaching students the traditional style (繁體字) — because I believe that education should serve the purpose of the community, and since most of the writing in major local Chinese newspapers is still in the traditional style, and most sign boards and local Chinese documents are still in that style, I think that it’s important for our students to learn it. However, in terms of the global situation, knowing the simplified style is also important. This is the reason, when I changed the textbook, that I picked one that is printed in both styles.
Another more controversial issue was the teaching of the phonetic symbols. CKS College had been teaching the Taiwan style phonetic symbols, which I think are already obsolete, and it was an added burden for students to learn another set of symbols for representing sounds rather than just using the Roman alphabet, which Pinyin is based on. So I initiated the switch to the Pinyin system.
Furthermore, the most important was changing the teaching approach and the presentation of the teaching materials from first to second language teaching. As I mentioned earlier, most of the Chinese schools had long been teaching Chinese as a first language, ignoring the fact that most of the Tsinoy kids are Tagalog or English native speakers. Even their parents might not speak Chinese anymore. In fact, the term “Chinese” is very problematic. If you say “Chinese” in the Philippines, then you are referring to “Chinese” from the Southern Min speaking area of Fujian province in China. So when you say “Chinese” spoken in the Philippine Chinese community, then you are referring to the Southern Min language. But the “Chinese” being taught in the Chinese schools is Mandarin or Putonghua/Guoyu, the national language of China and Taiwan. That’s why Mandarin is almost a “foreign” (I put “foreign” in quotes as the Chinese will kill me for saying this) language to the Chinese in the Philippine, as the lingua franca of the Philippine Chinese community is Hokkien (Minnanhua/Southern Min). With this background, teaching Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua/Guoyu) as a first language to the Tsinoy kids is just inappropriate.
In addition to changing the teaching approach to second language teaching, I also reinstituted bilingual classroom language instruction, that is, using Hokkien alongside the teaching of Mandarin/Putonghua/Guoyu. I think this is the missing link compared to the previous teaching of Chinese (Mandarin) in the Chinese schools. In fact, the teaching of “Chinese” in the Philippine Chinese schools evolved from monolingual (Hokkien) language learning to bilingual (Hokkien alongside Mandarin) language learning and teaching and then to monolingual Mandarin-only language learning and teaching. I believe that though most of the Tsinoy kids now don’t speak “Chinese” anymore, they actually still are getting a lot of Hokkien input in the family and in the community. Though Hokkien and Mandarin are two different languages from the linguistic point of view, they belong to the same language family. Hokkien, being reinforced alongside the learning of Mandarin will not only help the learners learn Mandarin, it will also help the learners maintain their “Chinese” once they leave the Chinese schools, as they will continuously hear Hokkien being spoken in their environment. Other than this, it is also functional for the Tsinoy kids to know Hokkien, as most of them will be staying and working in the Hokkien speaking Philippine Chinese community. And, most importantly, as an ethnic group in the Philippines, it is important for them to maintain their heritage language.
Okay, I disagree with Dr. Poa's desire to still put the bilingual Hokkien alongside Mandarin despite her adaptation to Pinyin and English/Mandarin. In my case, it's good that Dr. Poa is using the bilingual textbooks rather than the old trauma textbooks. However, her desire to still put Hokkien into the school can become an unnecessary burden. I want to make Mandarin simpler for anyone, without having to learn Hokkien. Hokkien should be treated as something you leave at home when you go to school, and use at home when you're at home.
Thankfully, more Chinese schools have ditched Hokkien entirely from the curriculum. Hokkien should be treated as a home language. Mandarin should be treated as the academic aim. It's because Hokkien isn't in the world's top spoken languages, Mandarin is!
