Traditional culture training set for Beijing teachers

All primary school and kindergarten teachers in Beijing will be required to receive 40 hours of training on the core values of Chinese socialism and traditional Chinese culture by 2020, the city's education commission announced. 

As a pilot program, teachers from six schools in Doncheng and Tongzhou districts will be the first to receive the training, starting in November, the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education said.

 The training sessions will include courses on traditional culture and crafts. All courses will be given online and via mobile applications. All teachers must complete the 40-hour training sessions by 2020. 

 To better educate children, the teachers must be better educated first. Also, a teacher must have deep affection for traditional culture, said Li Yi, the commission's deputy director. The courses are all online so the teachers can be flexible. 

 The commission will monitor teachers' progress in completing the training sessions and see if they've done their homework, Li said. It also will analyze which sessions receive more hits so the content can be better adjusted in the future. 

 The increasing proportion of ancient Chinese literature in the curriculum echoes the Ministry of Education's efforts to raise awareness of traditional culture among primary and middle school students. 

Students who begin Grade 1 in September will find ancient Chinese literature and science in their textbooks the first time such material has been introduced to new students since the establishment of the People's Republic of China.

According to education authorities, the set of Chinese language textbooks for the six primary grades contain 132 works of ancient Chinese literature, taking up about 30 percent of the content of each textbook. 

That's an increase of 80 percent over the set of textbooks previously published by People's Education Press, a publishing company under the Ministry of Education. 

Education Minister Chen Baosheng pledged in March to boost students' knowledge of traditional Chinese culture, and one of the measures was to design suitable textbooks.