加拿大主流媒体告诫崇洋的中国教育家和老师，不要把我们伪造的“爱迪生救母”的故事教给中国小学生

来源: yzout 于 2017-05-09 11:01:10 [档案] [旧帖] [给我悄悄话] 本文已被阅读：次 (2973 bytes)

Globe & Mail (7 days ago)

It is a story familiar to any Chinese student: Thomas Edison, as a boy of seven, came up with an invention that saved his mother from almost certain death. The story has appeared in Chinese primary school textbooks dating back to the 1980s as a potent lesson in the value of ingenuity and family loyalty. The “Napoleon of invention,” as Edison was called, was also a paragon of filial piety.

But the real invention in this case is the story itself and the lengthy tenure of a piece of fiction in Chinese textbooks has renewed anxieties over how and what China is teaching its children in the modern era.

In the story as it is has long been taught to Chinese second graders, Edison’s mother falls gravely ill with appendicitis and requires surgery. But by the time a surgeon arrives at the family home, darkness has fallen. The candles, the doctor judges, are too dim to properly light the procedure – and by morning, the ill woman will likely be dead.

Enter the boy Edison, who in a flourish of creative brilliance ingeniously arranges mirrors in such a way that they concentrate the candlelight, allowing the surgeon to work – and admiringly say of Edison: “We are so lucky this child was here today. He is such a smart boy!”

The mother lives – and, more than a century later so, too, has the story, at least in China.

In the version of the second-grade language and literature class textbook still in use today, “Edison saves his mother” occupies pages 137 to 139. It makes no reference to the inventor’s manifold contributions, including the phonograph, devices for recording and displaying motion pictures, and what has been called the world’s first long-life incandescent light bulb.

Instead, the story offers a lesson in moral conduct and is used to teach children new Chinese characters, including ones that mean “enlighten” and “praise.”

But “it has no basis in fact,” said Paul Israel, director and general editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University and a leading authority on the U.S. innovator. It is instead “a fictional event created for the 1940 movie Young Tom Edison starring Mickey Rooney.”