cfimages: Why do they have to be mutually exclusive though? At the age of twelve, I could show you where pretty much every country on the planet was located, and also tell you its capital. Yet I couldn’t have shown you where Cairns was on a map. So what? I think it’s far more important to have a broad overview than microscopic knowledge of one place. I am constantly astounded that my students at junior high school can’t even name the continents (in Chinese). This kind of lack of knowledge about anything outside Taiwan is what makes this place so damned parochial and it’s why they regularly put their collective feet in their mouths with things like Darkie toothpaste or whatever it used to be called. It’s why people who are native English speakers, but not white, regularly come on here and complain (and rightly so) about how hard it is to find work here. Because, as everyone knows, black, brown and yellow people can’t be American, British or Australian because American, British or Australian people are white. Likewise, that Polish or Russian person must be a native English speaker because they are white, and all white people speak English. There’s your Taiwanese parochialism at its finest.
I can’t name every province in China, but again, so what? I don’t know every canton of Switzerland either. So what? Are you assuming that because Taiwanese don’t know much about the rest of the world that they actually know a lot about their own history or culture? Do you really think the average Taiwanese person can name every province in China either? I’ll go you one better though. I have a map of Taiwan in my classroom and when I ask random students to show me Zhanghua County or Taoyuan County, many (perhaps even most) can’t. Taiwanese are, in the main, not only ignorant of the rest of the world, but also grossly ignorant of their own country and culture.
We actually did study Chinese history (briefly) in year 8. Should we have focussed entirely on the history of Australia instead, or how about the history of Victoria, or Melbourne, or the little area of Melbourne we lived in? After all, that could have occupied years of study. No, people obviously study world history or world geography to get an overview of things and so they don’t end up completely parochial. I actually wish we’d had enough time in school to study all sorts of history and geography I never got to study, including all sorts of obscure parts of the world, which is why I’ve read (and am still reading) about it to this day.
I would also argue that your order (local, regional, heritage) is completely out of order. People should learn about their cultural background first in a very broad sense, as well as in comparison to other broad, international topics, and then they should get progressively more narrowly focussed from there. Also, it’s far more important for an Australian kid to learn about England (and Europe) than Asia simply because Asia didn’t invent democracy or the combustion engine, and it didn’t find a cure for smallpox. England, and Europe, has bequeathed the average Australian kid far more than Asia has, and that will probably be the case for decades, if not centuries, to come.