대학 ‘교양한문’ 강의에 대한 새로운 모색

Abstract

Currently, universities have commercialized education according to the market principle of the Neo-liberalism and are working on reinforcing consumer-oriented education and competitiveness of education. Furthermore, due to the decrease of school age population, universities’ priority has become surviving in the competition, which has led them to discard the proper attitude of scholarly pursuit and turn into job training facility. Under these circumstances, it has been long since Classical Chinese courses such as “Classical Chinese Liberal Education” have become unpopular due to the perception that they are difficult and obsolete. Therefore, I have transformed the class into an introspective course in which the learners can learn classical Chinese and interpret classics in the contemporary context through the education that merged readings in classical Chinese with writing. Based on some level of accomplishment this has brought about, I would like to propose a few ways and directions of improvement. First, this paper examines the changes occurring to academic learning in the age of digital culture and neoliberalism, criticizes the problems of these changes, explores personalization process by way of exploring the contemporary meaning of classical Chinese literature and paper writing, and finally overviews students’ response to these classes. Looking at the opinions of the students who took the course, I could see that they feel the need for this kind of class. However, they also pointed out a few problems: the course title is too old-fashioned and stiff that it feels less accessible; also, number of enrolled students are too large that in-depth discussion is impossible and the it is difficult to have every paper corrected in detail. Also, lecturers must also put in greater amount of work in preparing these classes since they not only study classical Chinese, but also have to cross between the texts from the East and the West, or the contemporary and classical texts. Yet, there is also a saying that “review the old to learn the new.” Even if the time changes, one cannot discard the essence of university classes. Hence, a few of suggestions that I would like to propose are changing the title to something students may be intrigued to, and allowing the students to learn classical characters in a fun and easy manner, while maintaining the readings in classical Chinese. Also, instead of teaching many sentences, allowing students to be self-reflect by teaching the meaning of even a single sentence through cross-text and based on their interest. In the end, I would like to provide the students with an opportunity to personalize it by writing their own papers.