Waking up from an eight-hour siesta, glancing at the clock in the dark and recalling with remorse how many assignment deadlines I had missed because of this extended nap: the result of working overnight on a midterm paper: I suddenly got a sense of Whitman’s bubble.
My personal Whitman bubble is currently filled with Bronislaw Malinowski’s psychological functionalism, Sandra Gilbert’s ekphrastic poetry and my slow process of adjusting to that bubble. That’s right: my goal is to immerse myself in the bubble that many Whitman students try to break through.
While the content within individual bubbles varies, our communal Whitman bubble remains the product of what Whitman proudly claims: its traditional liberal arts education.
On its Web site, Whitman defines liberal arts education as a combination of “a passion for the life of the mind” and a bunch of skills to maintain that passion. I translate this five-line definition into a pressing need to enlarge my English vocabulary and a desperate eagerness for critical thinking skills, both of which my liberal arts education in China failed to offer.
Some Whitman readers might feel confused about why I think Chinese liberal arts education needs to teach students more English and some friends at home might feel equally confused because English is already a required course in Chinese schools from fifth grade to college.
In answer to my American readers: if conducted properly, English education is probably the only thing that Chinese liberal arts education can use to develop students’ critical thinking, because traditional Chinese education simply wants everyone to diminish his or her own ideas and to obey authorities.
In answer to my Chinese readers: sorry, we don’t conduct English education properly: there’s too much emphasis on grammar and written English. And those standardized English tests don’t ask for personal opinions either: our college entrance examination’s writing section even provides an essay outline for test-takers to follow.
It was not until I became an English major at Shantou University that I finally had opportunities for expressing myself. I submitted creative writing to the college’s English Writing Competition, made speeches in the university’s English Speech Contest, worked as a reporter and then an editor for the English newspaper The Shantou Beat and did many presentations and projects for classes.
However, I was still feeling restricted in a suffocating bubble, since many Chinese professors still expect students to cater to their ideas and styles. How did I sense those expectations? By looking at the grades on my papers and the looks on their faces.
After I took a few courses given by expatriate professors at my university, I had a chance to compare Chinese and Western pedagogy. It’s frustrating to notice that our pedagogies are not only teacher-centered, but also what-centered. Chinese professors like asking questions about what rather than why and how, probably because it’s easier to check facts than to evaluate arguments. The likely result is that we acquire nothing but a great memory.
But the good news is that my university has its Bulletin Board System: While most Shantou students are still tentative in class discussions, they produce perceptive and humorous insights in this nearly authority-free Internet forum.
Transitioning from my university’s bubble to Whitman’s bubble, I’m aware that Whitman has the same problem as Shantou in its relative isolation, which somewhat limits the praxis of a liberal arts education. But I’m blessed that Whitman’s liberal arts education has helped me mature in ways my Chinese universities could not.
The only price I’m paying for my Whitman experience is probably sleep. Unprecedented workloads of reading and writing have been keeping me up at night from time to time. But compared with the intellectual growth I’m obtaining, it’s not that bad a deal.