Bulletin Vol. 6 No. 6 May–Jun 1970

but no Chinese in his right mind would think of taking Western food for his regular daily meals. Our sports and athletic activities, our transportation, are completely Western. Takin g advantage of both the solar and lunar calendars, we join in the fun on holidays which have little significance for us with almost as much spirit as we bring to our Chinese festivals. Exhibitions o f modern painting alternate with showings of calligraphy and fine Chinese brush work. Our City Hall has sell-out houses for Chinese opera and world-famous symphony orchestras and ballet. The pattern of our lives is so interwoven with various strands that we must pause to identify the traditional values we seek to preserve: our language and literature, our history, religions and philosophy, our fine arts, as they have special meaning for us and as they contribute to the enlightenment of all mankind. The basic question remains the same: is Westernization the answer to our present situation? How do we clear up the misunderstanding of what Westernization and modernization mean , especially the confusion of the two? We must remember that for a long time Asian universities were assigned a secondary role in highe r education, producing teachers, clerks and civil servants, but leaving the research work and the advanced degrees to Britain, France, the Netherlands, German y and the United States. In The Chinese University we take the view that undergraduates must be taught by those who are themselves engaged i n research and the strengthening of the Graduate School is important to the standard of the entire University. While some Asian students will still seek higher degrees in the West, it is no longer necessary or even desirable for Asian universities to develop mainly as undergraduate institutions. The promotion of closer regional cooperation through associations and conferences has opened a new approach to educational planning. The Association of Southeast Asian Institutions of Higher Learning with 49 member universities and colleges recently discussed issues affectin g the region at a Workshop attended by 51 teachers and administrators. We found that in each of our countries the same questions arise: how should we meet the increasing demand for scientists and technologists; would it not be wiser to train more versatile and adaptable young people instead of producing specialists; should the emphasis be upon leadership training rather than on mere professional or technical competence; how do we meet our emotional, aesthetic and moral needs? There are no clear-cut answers but we all benefited from this opportunity to identify our special problems, t o define the areas of concern of Asians and to seek Asian solutions. We are looking for a "new synthesis" , to cull the best wherever we find it and to copy no particular system in its entirety. An example may be cited to illustrate the point. As I said earlier, universities in Asia from the beginning have been patterned after the models in the West—without any serious attempt to develop a new model that meets the needs of the country or the local community. Until recently all the universities in India, Pakistan, Ceylon, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong followed the British pattern faithfully, whereas the American model predominates in the Philippines and pre-1949 China. In contrast to the American practice, the British system recognizes no course credits, provides no majors or minors, gives very few lectures, but requires the students to specialize early in their college years and examine them only at the end of their three or four years of study at the university, the examination being comprehensive in nature and given by the teaching faculty of the university and external examiners from outside the university. The American system, by doing otherwise, attempts to give the students a much wider and broader education. The three Foundation Colleges of The Chinese University today, each of which predates the University, were very much patterned after the American model. After the University was established in 1963, we aspired to work out a system which would combine the best features of both British and American systems and which would appropriately meet the needs in Hong Kong. While doing so, we have invariably found that all these models are themselves under close and critical re-examination by some of the best academic minds in the West, and it would be folly for us to choose and adopt features that would be repudiated tomorrow. As a case in point, what should be the teaching method in a university? Educators in the Western world are far from finding an answer. In order to arrive at a contemporary synthesis, therefore , we have had to keep abreast with the latest thinking in the West and at the same time to contribute our own ideas — 5 —