Primary and secondary school students' introduction to calligraphy

Author: Zhang Hu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-09-22
Features: The book "Introduction to Calligraphy for Primary and Secondary School Students" has been in the making since its conception, writing, to its publication, spanning a full 20 years. Back in 1984, Comrade Li Peiyu, a reporter from the Beijing Daily, approached me. He mentioned that Hebei Province had a "Weekly Newspaper for Junior High School Students" and was looking for a calligrapher to open a column titled "Talking About Calligraphy with Middle School Students." Before the Cultural Revolution, many schools offered calligraphy classes, but after the Cultural Revolution, most schools abolished them. Now, people wanted to learn but had no one to teach them, so they hoped for some in-depth yet easy-to-understand, accessible, and engaging short articles for middle school students, to be written consecutively. Each piece was about 600 words long. Due to the busy nature of newspaper work at the time, I had to consider whether to take on the task. After much deliberation, I decided to accept it. I shared my own experiences of learning calligraphy as a child, learned about the desire of middle school students and their parents to study calligraphy, and reviewed some historical and modern materials on learning calligraphy and calligraphy knowledge. I then started drafting the outline and wrote each piece, intermittently, for nearly two years...