HSBC Group Chairman
Zhang Hong-jia said last week that not every high school graduate in
Taiwan has to go to college in order to attain a successful career. He was
speaking at an event advocating the importance of vocational education organized
by the Ministry of Education (MOE). The businessman suggested young people—or more
importantly their parents—should give greater consideration to the vocational
education system, where they can learn practical hands-on skills and gain
practical crafts-and-industry related experience before entering the workplace.
With some experience behind them, they can then choose to pursue further
studies on their own.
Jia’s suggestion
makes sense, though his words will not likely be heard or taken seriously by
most parents in Taiwan. Hard work, especially physical labor, is not taken seriously by
much of Taiwan’s middle and upper class families. Their eyes are set on desk
jobs for their children, a fantasy encouraged by contemporary television commercials
that build a falsely romantic image of businessmen. I don’t recall exactly
where I read it, but I do remember an opinion piece in the news earlier this
year lamenting the loss or dramatic decline of many “trade” skills such as
carpentry, plumbing, even agriculture. I need to do some re-reading, but I
think this is actually a prejudice inherited from the ancient writings of
Confucius, who seemed (if my memory is again not at fault) to place government
service over farming. (I’m speaking of a quote in the Analects that says
something like “choose farming and you starve, choose government service and
you never starve.”) The loss of certain traditional skills was documented in a
new book titled Lost Memories.
Professors throughout the many levels of higher
education in Taiwan can surely attest to having met many students who were
simply too immature for college and university environments. They have enough
social skills to avoid the boot, but they never truly benefit from their years
in school and end up passing through as mediocrities at best, major class
irritants at worst. We've all seen them and thought that their time would be
better spent working in the service or labor industries, where they might have
an opportunity to mature intellectually while experiencing the real world of complex
workplace relationships. When they are perhaps a bit more familiar with
themselves and their actual abilities or interests, they can return to
university to pursue a very focused educational goal.
This is, I suspect, what HSB Chairman Zhang was
advocating at the MOE event. These are also the arguments put forth some
decades ago by Robert Pirsig in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you haven’t read it, you should. It will certainly influence
the way you see the higher education industry in Taiwan.
The discussion of practical skills has also been personally important to me, as our Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Ilan University has this past week voted to open a Graduate Degree program focused on Culture Studies or Literary Studies. Going into this decision we faced a degree of criticism from those who see literature as a path away from a good career, but in actuality I believe that literature is the best path toward a fruitful career. More on that later, though your comments are welcome now.
