Xiluo Public School and the Local Community in Colonial Taiwan:

The Motivation behind “an Unsuitable Intellectual Ambition for a Rural Area” and Its Destiny

Abstract

The aim of this article is to elucidate how public schools were established in the Xiluo region of Taiwan and what kind of enrollment behaviors occurred during the Japanese colonial period. The population of the Xiluo region was enthusiastic about education, to the extent that it was described by the colonial administration as having “an unsuitable intellectual ambition for a rural area,” with many local academies for classical learning predating the Japanese colonial period. To borrow Hsu Pei-Hsien’s expression, Xiluo’s first public school was a kind of “communal school”, in the sense that it collected public assets from local academies and those involved in its management served as teachers and members of education committees. Initially, recruitment of students posed a significant challenge to the school. It competed unsuccessfully with local academies to attract boys, so that many girls, who had traditionally been outside the scope of traditional education, were recruited. As a result, the gender ratio for girls became relatively higher than in the rest of Taiwan. However, due to colonial circumstances surrounding female education, there were discrepancies between the experiences of boys and girls. Furthermore, from its founding until the end of the war, its principals were all Japanese. The colonial nature of education can be discerned in the situation in which, despite efforts of the Xiluo’s population to appropriate a “communal school” and to show their agencies, they were pushed into an even more “passive position” due to the declining value of Classical Chinese as a subject and the absence of higher-level schools.