SCHOOLS, SCHOOL-MASTERS, AND SCHOOL-BOOKS
Chinese passionately fond of education--Reverence for printed or
written words--State makes no laws for the education of the
people--The school-house and the school-master--System of
teaching--Boys first learn sound of words--After years of study learn
the meaning of each character--Small percentage of readers in
China--One set of school-books in every school in the Empire--The
_Three Word Classic_--The "Four Books" and the "Five Classics," with
analyses.
There is no nation in the world that has a more passionate and earnest
desire for education than the Chinese. In the four great divisions into
which all society has been roughly divided, the scholar is placed at the
head of the list, as the one that is considered most worthy of honour.
Outside of official rank, the highest title that the Chinese have in the
whole of their language is bestowed upon the school-master. He may be a
man so poor that he has hardly enough money to buy food for himself and
his family, and his clothes may be of the plainest and the meanest
description, and yet he has a title given him that is never bestowed upon
any of the three other classes. A man might be a millionaire and rolling
in wealth, but if he were simply a merchant or a tradesman, the coveted
title that the poorest scholar gets would never be given to him, even by
the most loyal of his friends or by the meanest servant in his employ.
The reverence that the nation has for learning has induced a sentimental
and what might seem to be a superstitious regard for the mere written or
printed word. Even that dead form is held to be so sacred that it may not
be misused or treated with contempt or indifference. A very common sight
in a Chinese street is to see a man with a basket slung over his shoulder
on which is inscribed two large characters which mean "Have pity on the
writing." His eyes are kept steadily on the roadway, and on any nook or
cranny by the side, and he eagerly pounces on any scraps of paper, no
matter how frayed or dirty, and places them in his basket. Occasionally he
catches sight of a broken piece of pottery or a fragment of a rice bowl on
which are some of the precious characters that were burnt into them when
they were being manufactured. These also are picked up and reverently laid
aside with the pieces of paper that have been rescued from the feet of the
passers-by.
You stop the man and you ask him what he means by picking up this rubbish
on the street, and he tells you that he is employed by benevolent persons
who cannot bear the thought of seeing the sacred characters that were
invented by the sages and that had been the cause of China's greatness
trodden under foot of men. And so he is gathering all that he can find on
the streets, and at a certain time with due ceremony the whole will be
burnt, and be thus saved from the dishonour that had been put upon them.
The devotion to education is not a mere sentimental one, but one that has
covered this great Empire with schoolhouses, for in all the towns and
cities and in all the larger villages even the people have established the
common schools in which the children of the locality may receive an
education. There are no such things as Government schools, neither are
there private ones. It is true that rich men sometimes engage teachers for
their sons and have the tuition carried on in their own homes, but what
may be called the common schools of the country are managed and supported
entirely by the elders or leading men in the various localities in which
they exist.
The State takes no cognizance whatever of the educational efforts of the
people, neither is it called upon to spend a cash in upholding the
institutions that are in existence for the teaching of the youth of the
country. The people have from time immemorial taken these duties upon
themselves, and they have willingly borne the responsibility of raising
the funds that have been necessary for the successful carrying on of the
schools.
The usual practice is at the close of the year for the leaders, say, of a
village to meet together and discuss the question of the next year's
school. They have already canvassed the parents who have sons, and
ascertained how many of them will attend and how much they are willing to
contribute towards the teacher's salary. They are thus in a position to
know whether they have sufficient funds to invite a first-class man to
take charge of the school, or whether they will have to be content with an
inferior scholar instead.
This question being settled, the next point is to secure the
school-master. If there happens to be one belonging to the village, or one
connected in any way with the leading men, the difficulty is then very
much simplified, but if an unknown man is to be engaged, then it may mean
endless complications for a whole year. He may turn out to be an
opium-smoker, or he may be a vagabond and rarely be seen within the walls
of the school-house; for when once he is engaged the people have no
redress whatever, but must tolerate all his misdeeds and pay him the
salary agreed upon without a murmur or a complaint to him personally. Any
attempt on the part of the villagers to compel him to carry out his
contract faithfully would simply end in their being censured and fined by
the mandarin for daring to assert themselves against one of the
highly-privileged classes in China. We will suppose, however, that a
fairly respectable man has been obtained, and that all the arrangements
for opening the school have been satisfactorily made. The usual time for
the commencement of the school year is three or four days after the "Feast
of Lanterns," which takes place about the middle of February.
The school-house is usually situated in a central part of the village, and
consists of a school-room capable of accommodating twenty or thirty
scholars, a small bedroom for the teacher, and a diminutive kitchen also
for his special use. The managers provide him with a four-poster, a high
oblong table and a few chairs, and also a mosquito-net to be used during
the warm weather when those plagues of the East carry on their campaign
with such unceasing vigour against all animal life. They also place a
table and chair in the school-room, which are to be for his own exclusive
use, but beyond these they leave the furnishing of the place to the
individual scholars, who bring their own stools and tables with them on
the day that the studies begin. On the table are an inkstone, a diminutive
water-bottle, two or three camel's-hair pens or brushes, a stick of Indian
ink, and last, though not least, a good solid piece of bamboo with which
the refractory and the indolent will frequently make acquaintance during
the coming months of the session. There are also a miniature teapot and
Lilliputian teacups, all deftly placed on a lacquer tray, ready for use
whenever the master feels that he would like to refresh himself with a few
sips of the popular beverage that "cheers but not inebriates."
The school life of a boy in China would seem to one who has not been
brought up in Western methods as a dreary and intolerable one, and such as
would take the heart out of any English lad and make him hate the very
sight of books as long as he lived. The duties of the day begin at a very
early hour, and with certain intermissions for meals last until the
evening shades have entered the school-room and blurred the faces of the
books so that the strange, weird-looking words cannot be recognized one
from the other.
The little fellows have to rise as the dawn begins to fling its grey and
trembling light across the darkness that clouds the earth, and to send its
kindly messages into the homes of rich and poor. Feeling the terror of the
master upon them, they quickly jump out of bed, and with no time to wash
their faces or to brush their hair, they hurry along the various paths
that lead to the school, where they find the teacher waiting for them, and
with a frown upon his face if they should happen to be a few minutes late.
The lads never enter the school-room without a feeling of restraint. It is
considered that a cold and haughty kind of bearing on the part of the
master is essential in order to maintain the discipline of the school.
There is, therefore, very seldom if ever any feeling of affection or
devotion between the scholars and him. To them he appears to have no
kindliness of heart and no human sympathies, nor any lovable thought for
any one of them. He is simply there as a kind of living machine to teach
these youngsters this huge Chinese language, but as for sentiment or any
tender feeling for them, that is utterly out of the question.
The method in which the studies are carried on is the very reverse of what
is demanded and insisted upon in the home schools. There the great aim is
to secure not only perfect order but as complete silence as possible. When
there is anything like noise in the school-room it means that the lads are
talking with each other and not studying their lessons. An English lad can
best master these by thinking over them, and in silence committing to
memory the various thoughts or problems that may be contained in the book
he is called upon to study.
Now it seems impossible for any Chinese boy to impress upon his mind's eye
the intricate and apparently meaningless strokes that make up the ordinary
Chinese word. He seems to be able to do this only by bawling them at the
very top of his voice. Efforts have been made to get the scholars in a
school to learn them without raising their voices, but failure has always
been the result. The consequence is, that silence amongst the lads is most
displeasing to a Chinese school-master, and a stern, severe look from him
will set them all off into shouts so deafening that only one great uproar
can be heard resounding through the building, each lad seeming only to be
contending with all the rest to see if he cannot outshout them all. The
drudgery of learning to recognize the Chinese words is something that
cannot be appreciated by a Western student. With English words, for
example, each one is composed of so many letters, has a definite sound and
definite meanings, and after a time, if a boy fails to remember any
particular one, he simply spells it, and at once sound comes tripping back
to his recollection. There is no such easy process to the grasping of the
Chinese characters. Each one is a solemn, hard-featured picture that
stands apart by itself and has no connecting link with any other one in
the language. You cannot reason out what shall be the sound or meaning of
any one word by analogy, for each one is complete in itself and has a
solitary entity of its own. A page of Chinese print gives one the
impression that one has lighted upon a series of cryptic puzzles that the
inventor has made as intricate and involved as the complex and oblique
mind of the Chinese could make them.
The Chinese school-masters throughout the country having realized that to
grasp the sounds of these weird and unromantic figures and the meaning
that lies concealed behind them would be an absolute impossibility for the
youth of the country, have divided up the great attempt into two distinct
efforts. The first thing, therefore, that a lad has to do when he goes to
school is to shout out in all the various tones of the gamut the names of
these ancient, hoary-headed symbols, and at the same time to impress upon
his memory the picture of each one, with its dots and curves and minute up
and down strokes, that it shall be a living picture that his mind can call
up at any moment that he hears its name pronounced.
The primary process goes on for about five years, during which time he has
read through most of his school-books. With one's notions that one has got
from English school life it is impossible at first to realize the
stupendous work that is involved in this dreary way of being educated. The
boy comes to school at early dawn, and he is kept at his desk, with the
exception of his meal hours, till night is throwing its shadows over the
earth. There is no intermission and no racing about the playground at
certain intervals to break in upon the eternal monotony of grinding study.
The playground is a Western institution that has never found its way into
the East. The lads have no time for such inventions that would interfere
with work. Life out here is serious and life is earnest, for the
school-boy at least, and no frivolous methods must be allowed to stay the
studies of this gigantic language.
The whole day, therefore, is spent in acquiring the sounds and the look of
each particular word, without having the remotest idea what they mean. He
comes the next day and the same grinding goes on. The spring passes into
summer and summer into autumn, and one day is like another in its weary
monotony, and the sounds in growing numbers clang and ring within his
brain, and the weird little pictures are hung up in the picture gallery of
his mind, but they tell him no story, neither do they suggest the poetry
and romance that often lie hidden within so many of them.
This fearful kind of treadmill education goes on for four or five years
with boys of ordinary intelligence, but for three or four with lads of
exceptional abilities and fine memories, who have the faculty of
remembering both the sounds and the faces of the thousands of characters
that they meet with in their school-books. During all those precious years
when the intellects of the lads are just in that stage when they are open
to development and expansion, they are bound and contracted by a
miserable system that has kept this nation from advancing in thought and
from claiming the position amongst the nations of the world that it would
have been entitled to had a wider liberty been given it in the training of
its youth.
The cruel thing about it is that though of extreme age, having been
started in the famous Han Dynasty (B.C. 296-A.D. 23), it is in no sense an
outcome of the teaching of the sages. There is ample evidence from Chinese
documents to show that the common schools were conducted in the time, say,
of Confucius (B.C. 550) more as they are carried on in Western lands, and
that even girls were instructed in the _Book of Odes_, one of the stiffest
of the sacred classics, and that books were read not simply in the
mechanical way that they have been for two thousand years, but because of
the interest of the subjects that were discussed in them.
The years have gone slowly by and nature in successive seasons has poured
out of the bounties of an untrammelled heart the riches that have filled
men's hearts with gladness, but the school-house has continued to be the
prison-house where thought was never allowed to blossom, and where the
possibilities of the human heart were crushed and cramped beneath an iron
system that made the spirit of romance and fairy tale and adventure die
out of the youthful manhood of the nation.
At last the morning came to our scholar when the teacher began to explain
the meaning of the strange old-world pictures that stood in columns down
the pages of his books. Their names were all known and their faces were
very familiar, for with many a sigh, and sometimes almost with breaking
heart they had been read and reread, until every lineament in their
wizened faces had been printed on the pupil's hearts. And what a
revelation was the rendering made by the stern master who had simply been
the corrector of wrong sounds, the cold, severe tyrant of the school who
had never seemed to feel one touch of sympathy for the young hearts under
his control.
Many of the dry and colourless pictures under the touch of this stern and
apparently cold-blooded teacher became instinct with life, and human faces
peered through them, and the voices of men that lived ages ago could be
heard speaking in the language of to-day, exhorting the scholars to a
noble and a virtuous ambition. Others, again, exhaled the fragrance of the
fields and the perfume of flowers, whilst one could hear the rustling of
the corn as the breeze swept over it, and could see in imagination the
mountains with their sun-crowned summits and the shadows chasing each
other like school-boys along their rugged sides.
The whole of Chinese history that had lain within the cold and lifeless
grasp of these square little puzzles which he had looked upon with
unutterable loathing for five years, now under the magic touch of the
teacher's hand began to tell the story of the past. He now heard for the
first time of the great revolutions that had changed the destinies of
proud dynasties, and listened to the clang of battle, and the mighty
heroes who had figured in the nation's life centuries ago now seemed to
march by, and he appeared to be able to catch a glimpse of their faces and
to compare the pictures of them that he had imagined in his mind with the
reality now before him.
One very unhappy result of compelling the boys to spend four or five years
in merely learning the sounds of the words, and in familiarizing them with
their look without at the same time acquiring a knowledge of their
meaning, is to greatly reduce the number of those who can read any book
that is put before them as is the case in the West. Fully sixty per cent.
of the lads that enter the common schools leave before they reach the
second stage. There are many reasons for this, but the chief one is a
financial one. The parents are poor, and so when a boy reaches a certain
age his services may be required to help in the support of the family, or
a good situation is offered that does not demand much education, and the
lad is glad of any excuse that will take him away from the heartbreaking
drudgery of simply learning sounds; and so he jumps for joy when his books
are thrown aside, and as he realizes that he is never more required to
enter the school-room again.
All these boys have acquired a certain smattering of knowledge, which,
however, is absolutely useless to them for the purpose of enabling them to
read. One constantly meets with men that can read a page of a book who
have not the remotest idea of what the meaning of the passage is. This is
because they left school before the second stage in their education was
reached, and therefore for all practical purposes they are no better off
than those who have never received any instruction when they were lads.
The mandarins are accustomed to put out proclamations about anything they
wish to order or to instruct the people under their charge. These are
posted up in prominent places throughout the town, and knots of men gather
round them who seem to be able to read fluently the strange
mysterious-looking symbols that compose them. You ask a man who is reading
one of these to explain to you what the mandarin wishes to be done. He
says he really cannot tell you, for when he was at school he never got
further than the initial stage of learning to recognize the characters
with the names that belong to them, and therefore he is unable to explain
to you what the mandarin is forbidding or what regulations he is issuing
for the conduct of the people.
[Illustration: A SCHOLAR IN OFFICIAL DRESS.
_To face p. 258._]
The consequence of this utterly insane plan of education is that for a
civilized country such as China claims to be, the people are grossly
ignorant and uneducated. Taking the population at four hundred millions,
and say half of these are women who may safely be said to have never
been to any school when they were girls, that leaves two hundred millions
of men to be considered. Sinologues who have been well qualified to deal
with the subject, after serious calculations have come to the conclusion
that not more than fifteen millions of readers exist throughout the length
and breadth of the land. These include men who have a mere smattering of
education, but who know enough to be book-keepers and accountants, and
doctors who can write their own prescriptions, and shopkeepers who can
make out their bills, but in such misshapen and uncouth hieroglyphics that
they would make Confucius shudder with disgust were he allowed to visit
the earth, and see what caricatures these men have made of the marvellous
inventions of the darkest ages of China.
Fifteen millions is to my mind a most liberal estimate of the readers of
this country. Why writers on China should have persistently represented
the people of this land as being highly educated is a mystery to those who
profess to be only moderately acquainted with the subject. The country is
illiterate, grossly illiterate, and as a result is festering with pride
and with contempt for every other nation outside of the Middle Kingdom.
There is just now going on throughout the country, however, a tremendous
awakening, and the rush after education on Western lines is one in which
all classes of society are united. The old obsolete system is doomed, and
the youth of the future will be no more subject to the pain and the
weariness and the heartbreaking that countless generations of the young
manhood of the country have had to endure in the past.
We now come to the school-books of the nation, for though there never has
been an Educational Board in China, and none of the dynasties that have
successively sat on the Dragon Throne of this Empire have ever legislated
with regard to the teaching of the youth of the land, there has always
existed but one set of books that are the text books in every school
throughout the country, and which have been used in every scholastic
institution that has ever existed in the long ages of the past. The
Chinaman is thoroughgoing in his conservatism. He has never weakened on
that subject. Even in his smells he is the rankest Tory that ever lived.
The odours that reek through the streets, and send their aroma down the
alleyways, and gently mingle in the atmosphere of the homes, have nothing
modern in them, but are the lineal descendants of a long line of ancestors
that vanish from sight in the mist and obscurity of a remote past.
As a result of this national instinct, no teacher has ever had the
hardihood to propose that there should be any alteration in the books that
should be used in the instruction either of the young or of the more
advanced pupils who may be planning for literary honours. This is all the
more remarkable considering the wide extent of territory of the Chinese
Empire, and of the varieties of languages that are used by the people.
The Chinese are generally spoken of as one race, and so they are in the
great outstanding features that constitute them one distinct nation, and
yet they are divided off from one another in many large regions by
dialects so different from each other, that the people occupying them
cannot understand the languages that are spoken in those outside of their
own.
It would have seemed that such radical differences as those produced by
what is practically a foreign language would have led to different methods
and different ideals as to the management of their schools, but they have
not. You pass along the great plains where the fertility of the soil has
given prosperity to the people, and you examine the schools and you find
one set of text books in every one. You travel over mountain ranges where
the people are having a severe struggle for existence and where a
language is spoken that needs an interpreter before you can enter into
conversation with them. You enter into their village schools and you find
the same familiar books, but the names given to the strange weird-looking
little pictures are so different from those they call them on the other
side of the mountains that you cannot recognize them. You pass up the
great Yang-tze, the "Son of the Ocean," and you step out of your boats a
few hundred miles apart from the last place you rested at, and you
discover that every locality has its own dialect. You make your way to the
nearest school, and still the same books meet your eye, with just the same
dog-eared, uninviting appearance that they present in any latitude or
longitude of the Empire in which you may meet them. You listen to see if
you can catch the tones in which the lads scream out at the top of their
voices the uncouth metallic tones in which they call out the names of the
pictures that fill the pages of their books, but they change in every
place you visit, and your mind is filled with a kind of wonder at the
immense variety of tones and dialects in which the students of this vast
country ring the changes on the books that for countless ages have been
the only ones from which they have had to study.
With regard to these school-books it has to be stated that there has never
been any attempt made to render them attractive to the children that use
them. In England the very reverse of this is the case. They are printed as
a rule on clean white paper, and in a type that is so distinct that the
pupils have never to strain their eyes to make out the letterpress. In
addition to this, most of the books are illustrated with beautiful
pictures that give a fascination to the pages, whilst they help the
scholars to grasp the meaning of the subjects that they have to study.
Now in China there is nothing done to ease the sorrows of the lads in
their grappling with this huge language of cryptic pictures that refuse to
have their meanings explored excepting after years of most painful study.
The books are printed upon the very poorest paper in order to lessen the
cost. The words, too, are often blurred and indistinct, for the wooden
blocks from which they are printed are generally so worn by years of use,
that the delicate strokes and minute touches with the pen, and the
involved and complicated interweaving of straight and waving lines that go
to the making up of the old-world-looking pictures, get frayed and broken
in the printing, so that it requires a practised eye to distinguish some
of them from others that have a natural likeness.
The pages of these books present a most dreary and uninviting appearance.
They are never lightened by any pictures, and no artist has ever attempted
to vary the dreariness of school life by any sketches from nature or any
scene from human life. It is no wonder that the artistic faculty in the
Chinaman has been developed in a grotesque and unrealistic fashion, or
that nature seems to be made to be conformed to the stiff and formal
characters upon which the eyes of the youth of China have to look during
the early years when the artistic element is waiting to be moulded into
those finer shapes that will produce the great pictures that are seen in
the West. Art in China has never had any room in which to play her part in
the development of the mind, or in training the fancies and the
imagination of men. The artist in this land is a man that draws his scenes
by rule and compass, and he would lose caste were he to violate certain
canons that must be observed in the drawing of a landscape or in the pose
or attitude of the human figure. He never dreams of going out into the
fields or of sitting on a hillside and of trying to reproduce the scene
that lies stretched before him. There is no freedom and no losing of
oneself in the inspiration of the moment, when forgetful of rules and
mastered by the subtle forces that have touched his dreams into action, he
shall produce something that no man has ever done before him. The chill of
the years is upon him, when he was compelled, at the very time when his
soul was in the process of formation, to keep his gaze upon those square
unartistic hieroglyphics, and crushing down all the poetry and all the
romance that lay dormant in his nature, to take these as the highest
ideals for all his conceptions of art in the future.
The first book that is put into the hands of the young scholar is called
the _Three Word Classic_, because it is written in stanzas of three words
each. It would naturally be supposed that this book was of the simplest
and most elementary character, and suited for the immature minds and
brains of the lads who are called upon to study it. In the West this would
certainly have been the case, but the East, with its metaphysical trend of
thought and tendency to mysticism, refuses to consider that it has to come
down to the level of the young who are just beginning their studies, and
whose minds can grasp only the commonest and the most everyday thoughts.
The result is there is not to-day a single child's book in China, and no
fairy stories for children, and no household rhymes that can be bought at
the booksellers, and put into the hands of the little ones in the nursery.
The books in this land are for grown-up men, and demand thought and study
and ponderous commentaries in order to be understood; and yet it is these
very same that are put into the hands of a youth of tender years when he
begins to grapple with this gigantic system of mystic pictures that
contain the thoughts and passions and feelings of the Chinese race.
The _Three Word Classic_ is a very admirable instance of the beau ideal
kind of book that the educationist of this land puts into the hands of a
boy, say, of eight or nine years of age. It begins by saying--
"Man at birth,
His Nature's virtuous,
All natures alike,
Vary by experience.
Formerly Mencius' mother
Chose her locality,
Son refused study
She severed web," etc.
The meaning of this passage when put into a little more diffuse language
is that when a child is born his heart is naturally good and inclined to
virtue. All children in fact come into the world with natures very much
like each other, and that it is only as they grow up and come under the
influence of surrounding circumstances that they do not all turn out good.
It is not men's natures that are corrupt, but it is the influence of evil
companions and bad training that lead so many astray, and prevent men from
following the bent that is in every man's mind towards virtue.
To illustrate this, the case of the great philosopher Mencius is described
with some minuteness. It appears that he had a mother who was a woman of
great force of character. She was determined that her son should grow up
to be a great man, but in order to secure this it was essential that his
surroundings should be such as would be helpful to the carrying out of
this ambition of the mother's heart. Three times did she remove from the
localities she had chosen for her home, because the neighbours were not up
to the moral standard that would qualify them to be proper examples for
her son.
At length having found the home that satisfied her, she discovered to her
sorrow that Mencius was not inclined to work up to her ideal. He was a
high-spirited lad and full of animal spirits, and preferred to be flying
kites or spinning tops, or tossing the shuttlecock from one to another
with the side of his shoe, to serious study with his books. She was a
brave woman was this mother of the future philosopher. She was quite alone
in the world, for her husband was dead and her relatives lived far away,
and her only source of livelihood was the loom on which she wove the webs
that she disposed of in the nearest market town.
At length the crisis came. One day she had been begging and entreating her
son to be a good boy and give his heart to his studies. He did not seem
moved, however, by her passionate appeals, and in her agony of spirit, and
feeling that life had no charm for her, she grasped a knife that lay by
and began to cut and mangle the web she was weaving. Mencius was so
horrified at this proceeding of his mother, and so cut to the heart that
his conduct should have driven her to such an act of despair, that with
tears in his eyes he promised that he would never trouble her again with
any misconduct of his. From that day he was completely changed. With heart
and soul he entered into his studies. He became a distinguished scholar,
and finally produced works that have moulded and influenced the thinkers
of this nation from his own times (B.C. 372-289) down to the present.
Other examples are given in this famous school-book of men who, desiring
to conform to the high principles that lie embedded in the soul of every
child at birth, have fought manfully against external circumstances and
have come out successful in the end. It is told of one man who
subsequently became very distinguished, that when he was a young man he
was so poor that he had no money to buy oil with which to study after
dark. So determined, however, was he that his evenings should not be
wasted, that he hit upon the ingenious plan of catching a number of
fireflies, and from the light they threw out he kept up his reading as
late into the night as he desired. Another man equally poor used to take
his book out on a winter's night, and by the lights of the snow that fell
on it pursue his studies after all the rest of the family were buried in
slumber.
The next book that follows hard upon the _Three Word Classic_ is the
_Classic on Filial Piety_, a book that was written by the great sage
Confucius, and is a voluminous disquisition upon the duties and virtues of
honouring one's parents. There is no doubt but that the profound respect
that the Chinese have for the doctrine of filial piety has been fostered
in the nation by this work having been for so many centuries the
school-book of the children in all the schools throughout the length and
breadth of the land.
Although in practical life one looks often in vain for a large and general
carrying out of the principles laid down by Confucius, there is no doubt
that there is such a universal acceptance of this divinely commanded
virtue that the effect on the nation has been extremely beneficial. The
ideal is in the air and permeates human life at every point, and though
men through the infirmities of their fallen nature often transgress the
teachings of the sages on this point, there is still a vast amount of
restraint that is put upon the passions of men's hearts in their treatment
of their parents.
Before the _Classic on Filial Piety_ has been read through, the youthful
pupils are introduced to the study of the masterpieces of the great
writers and thinkers of the nation. There are no gradual and easy stages
that are to land them finally into the abstruse style and profound
thinking of the books that have really shaped the life and thought of the
Chinese race. In England there are innumerable stepping-stones between the
story of Jack and Jill and Macaulay's _History of England_, and boys of
ten or eleven would never be called upon to attempt the study of the
latter. The lads of China, however, are not treated with the same
indulgence, for they are put to the study of books that test the thinking
powers of the wisest and the most distinguished scholars in the land. A
brief statement of the teaching of these will show what is the kind of
studies that the youth in China has for a long course of centuries been
compelled to submit to.
The first in order of the "Four Books" that is put into the hands of the
pupils is _The Great Learning_. The leading thoughts that are discussed in
it are how men are to control themselves so that they may become useful
members of society; how they are to manage their families so that peace
may be preserved in the home and the sons and daughters turn out well; and
lastly, the best methods of governing a state so that the highest
happiness may be secured to all its inhabitants. These three points that
affect the whole of society in some form or other, may well be considered
the greatest kind of learning that any man might desire to master.
The next is _The Doctrine of the Mean_, a book that is insufferably dull
and monotonous, but is filled with arguments to show that men should not
rush into extremes, but should pursue the middle path in every undertaking
in which they may engage. It is one of the most difficult of the "Four
Books" to understand, but its main drift is that which has been indicated
above. Following on this confessedly difficult work are the writings of
Mencius, to whom reference has been made in the previous pages. This
philosopher was a most practical and a most genial kind of writer. To him
belongs the honour of defining what he calls the five virtues that are
eternal in their character, viz. love, righteousness, courtesy, a wise
appreciation of life, and sincerity. He dwells, however, more fully on the
two first, and shows how in the management of a state they are most
important factors, without which it must eventually come to destruction.
The fourth book is called the _Analects_, or it might be termed the Table
Talk of Confucius, for it is largely made up of brief and pithy
utterances of the great sage whilst conversing with the various characters
that appear in its pages. Like Mencius, he has had the distinction of
marking out a fivefold relationship that has been accepted by succeeding
ages as a very masterpiece of thought and genius. These are the relation
between sovereign and people, between parents and children, between
husband and wife, between elder and younger brothers, and between friend
and friend. These are discussed very fully, and it is shown that the
divisions that Confucius made, if properly recognized and carried out,
would secure happiness and prosperity to all the people of any country or
state.
There are two figures, however, in this interesting work that are of
surpassing interest, and that have had a profound effect on the character
and thought of the nation ever since. These are what Confucius calls "The
Son of a King," and "The Small Man." The former of these is the conception
in the mind of the great sage of what he deemed to be the ideal man. It is
not, however, one born in a palace and heir to a throne. He might first
have seen the light of day in a cottage, and have spent all his life
there. The conception was of a man of princely mind, who acted as though
he were really the son of a king and was destined one day to rule an
Empire. His thoughts were all noble, and no shadow of anything mean or
despicable ever fell upon his soul. "The Small Man" was the very reverse
of this. He was common and mean in all that he did. No lofty thought ever
crossed his mind, and no ambition to excel in the finer qualities that
make up the beautiful life ever lifted him up for a moment from the low
level in which he constantly lived. If Confucius had never written another
word, but had been simply content to have flashed this inspiration of
genius in the pictures he has drawn of these two characters upon the
coming centuries, he would have done incalculable service to his race.
Following on the "Four Books" there come in quick succession the "Five
Classics," which are given to the boys to read. The first of these is the
_Book of Poetry_, which contains the national songs that were sung by the
fathers of the race, as well as those used on royal and solemn occasions,
such as when some great function was being performed in the presence of
the sovereign, or when in the ancestral halls the members of the clans
were assembled to offer sacrifices to the spirits of their ancestors. From
a Western standpoint they are insufferably dull as a whole, for they are
wanting in passion and intensity, and never seem to be able to stir men
into enthusiasm or to set the blood on fire.
The next in order of study is the _Book of History_, which contains the
brief record of some of the leading events that took place in the first
five dynasties that ruled over the Chinese race from B.C. 2357, down to
the year B.C. 627.[3] Then comes the _Record of Ceremonies_, which
contains minute directions how to act with ceremonious politeness to the
members of one's own family, to strangers, to those in authority, and to
any one that one may meet in society under every and any conditions
whatsoever.
It is most amusing to read of the minute directions that are given in this
manual of etiquette with regard to the way in which parents should be
treated by their children. "Boys and girls who are still under age ought
to rise from their beds at dawn and wash their hands and rinse their
mouths, and carefully comb their hair. They should then hasten to the
bedroom of their parents and inquire if they are in need of any
refreshment. If they are, they must at once proceed to the kitchen and
provide something savoury for them to partake of, and they must stand by
with heads slightly lowered in token of profound respect whilst they are
eating the food they have prepared for them."
Rules even are laid down as to how the children should act when a father,
for example, has been doing something that needs reproof. "When he has
been in error the son must point this out in an exceedingly humble manner,
in a gentle tone and a countenance on which there must not be the shadow
of a frown. If the father refuses to listen, the son must become still
more dutiful than he has ever been, until finding that any unpleasant
feeling has passed away he must again with great respect point out what he
considers ought to be rectified in his conduct, and try and show him the
injury he is doing to the department, district, village or neighbourhood
in which he lives. Should the father be so enraged at this as to beat his
son till the blood flows down, he must not dare to harbour the least
resentment against him, but must serve him with increased respect and
reverence."
The fourth of the "Five Classics" is called the _Record of the Spring and
Autumn_, and was composed by Confucius. His object in writing it was to
give a narrative of events in continuation of the history contained in the
_Book of History_ mentioned above. He desired also to give the nation a
lasting monument of himself, for he seemed to be haunted with an idea that
if he did not leave some record of himself, his name and his memory would
perish from the face of the earth.
His narrative of events extends from B.C. 722-480, but the whole thing has
been done in the most inartistic fashion. The sentences are brief and
matter of fact, and whether it be an atrocious murder or a deed of heroism
that is recorded, the author is careful to conceal what his own views are
with regard to them. No details are given and no opinion expressed, the
facts are simply recorded, and that is all; and yet Confucius declared
that it would be by the _Records of the Spring and Autumn_ that
succeeding ages would either honour or condemn him, a prediction that was
bound never to be fulfilled.
The last of the "Five Classics" is the _Book of Changes_, the most
mysterious and the most unfathomable of all the books in the Chinese
language. It consists of sixty-four short essays, and is founded upon the
same number of lineal figures, each made up of six lines, some of which
are whole and some are divided. From these figures are evolved all kinds
of theories on moral, social, and spiritualistic questions. It is the
happy hunting-ground of fortune-tellers, who can predict from the peculiar
way in which the lines happen to be placed in relation to each other
whether prosperity is to come into a man's life, or whether misery and
sorrow are to close it in disaster.
In the above I have given a very rough and general summary of the
school-books that the youth of China have had to study from the earliest
days down to the present. The common subjects that are taught in the
schools at home, such as arithmetic, geography, grammar, and such like,
have no place in the schools of this country. The result is that the whole
nation is grossly ignorant of every other country outside of their own,
and this has engendered conceit and contempt and an arrogant spirit for
countries that stand in the van of civilization in the West.
But a mighty change is even now working in this old Empire, and men are
beginning to realize that the system of education that has so far been in
existence is a radically defective one, and must be displaced by those
that are more in a line with the ones that have raised the West to such a
high pitch of learning in so many departments of study. There is just now
a tremendous thirst for Western education, and the nation seems prepared
to abandon the old conservative systems that have been such a hindrance to
the advance of thought in the past.