Harry Potter is one of the many fantasy characters that are featured in new Chinese textbooks. (Photo : Reuters)
Experimental Chinese textbooks are compiling science fiction and fantasy stories for secondary school students, bringing characters like Harry Potter into classrooms for the first time, according to the Beijing Daily.
The series of textbooks is for the sixth and seventh-grade students in Jingshan School in Beijing, a key national school for the country's experimental education. In the new edition, there will be three sections added for science fiction and fantasy, news writing and ancient Chinese poetry.
The first chapter from "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" entitled "The Boy Who Lived" is one of the excerpts from popular stories included in the first section of the new edition. "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "Borrowing Palm Leaf-Fan" from the Monkey King series are among others included.
"Apart from content from classics such as 'Journey to the West,' 'Harry Potter,' popular novel 'Countryside Teacher' written by Liu Cixin--author of the world hit 'The Three-Body Problem,' are also included in the new textbook," said Wang Haixing, who serves as one of the books' editors and a Chinese-language teacher in Jingshan School.
Aside from reading about the characters in their textbooks, students also get to put up drama performances and engage in free topic story writing using the stories as prompts. This is rarely seen in Chinese secondary classrooms.
"Injecting sci-fi into Chinese lessons is to stimulate pupils' imagination and develop their interest in reading," said Wang.
In the news writing section, social issues and global news are also discussed and explored, such as about the late president of South Africa Nelson Mandela and the moon landing.
