let us read

While attending grad school getting my M.Ed, the Diary of Anne Frank was brought up quite a few times. Sad to say, but I had never read this book back in Taiwan where millions of young girls had read it, usually when they are around Anne's age when she kept the diary.

I went to the library yesterday and actually found a Mandarin copy of the diary and I read the whole book in an afternoon. I was sad, not only because of the story about Anne, her family, Jewish people, and Holocaust, but also because of the fact that I didn't read the book until now. While the American middle school students are reading Anne Frank and some other important books about/for history, the Taiwanese students are struggling to memorize words in their history books and hoping they will be able to fill in the blanks correctly in their next history exam.

I guess the Asian students do read more about the wars between the Asian countries while the American and European students read more about the Western wars... but I believe that in order to allow the students to be educated to be a "global person," being taught more about the whole globe is important, and knowing the important events that happened in the world will also allow them to broden their views and visions. When we learned about Jewish people being persecuted by the Nazis, the history book that we used in school simply stated that Jews were persecuted by the Nazis at the time. Nothing else. No additional reading being assigned or encouarged for students to read.

I've realized that there are a lot of great books I have to read to catch up with the people around me. John reads fast and reads a lot, and so do I (in Mandarin; I can't read English books all that fast), but I'm going to read not only Mandarin and Japanese books but English books, and allow myself opportunities to see the people and world around me a more sophisticated view.