DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF EDUCATION
The difficulties in the way of education differ in Government schools
and in Mission schools. If the Chinese Government could unite the
Government schools to the Mission schools, they would overcome all
these difficulties, and they would have a most perfect system of
Western education. Of all the difficulties lying in the way of
Government schools, first and foremost is the fundamental weakness of
China, that weakness which is endangering her national existence, a
weakness which I fear she will never completely surmount until she
accepts a higher ideal. For her weakness is the universal greed for
gain. Resident after resident reported the same cause of weakness,
that a Chinaman cannot resist taking his "squeeze"--that is, his
commission. It is not of course so dishonest as it would be on our
side of the globe, because a Chinaman is more or less avowedly paid by
these commissions, and therefore in many ways they are rather
equivalent to the fees paid by an Englishman to a Government office
than to illicit commissions, the acceptance of which in this country is
punishable by law. If it is not as immoral, it is almost as
deleterious to efficiency, because it tends {294} to make officials
unreasonable in their action. To ask the reason why things are done in
China, is always to receive the answer that somebody got a "squeeze"
thereby.
And so it is with education. As we wandered through room after room
filled with apparatus sufficient to teach thousands of students, and of
such a complicated nature as absolutely to confuse those students when
taught, one longed that a tithe of this expenditure could have been
used for that modicum of apparatus which is necessary to make not a few
mission schools thoroughly efficient. Much of the apparatus has never
got outside its packing cases, and perhaps a great deal had better
permanently remain there, for nothing is so subversive to the proper
teaching of men whose great defect is that they have never handled
things with their hands, as to give them complicated apparatus to
demonstrate the most recondite laws of science. A great scientific
teacher, when consulted about the apparatus necessary for elementary
science, advised plenty of bonnet wire, glass tubes, and one or two
other little things of that sort. When one asks why the Chinese have
been so lavish in their expenditure on apparatus which they cannot and
will not use, the reply is the same old answer--somebody got a
commission. Bui I think beyond that there is a real belief that
education is a matter of expensive apparatus--a belief which is not
altogether unknown on this side of the globe.
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This brings me to the second great difficulty in the path of Government
education. They will believe that an efficient education results
rather from having an expensive building than from a competent teacher.
I have before had occasion to refer to the extreme simplicity of the
life of the Chinese. Many of the schools were housed, and very
comfortably housed, in Chinese houses. The Chinese house always looks
out on a courtyard, and courtyard is joined to courtyard by passages.
The rooms are only divided from the courtyard by carved wooden screens
whose interstices are sometimes filled with paper and sometimes not.
They are eminently sanitary--in fact, to a large extent they fulfil the
requirements of the "open-air cure." In one case in the courtyard were
a lot of basins and ewers, and the boys were compelled to have a wash,
which if extensive must, in the winter, have been extremely unpleasant.
For all this I expressed my sincere admiration to my friend the
Director of Education, but he received my compliment much in the same
spirit with which a mother accepts your assertion that her child is far
prettier in her every-day dress with tousled hair than she is in her
Sunday clothes, as with hideous tidiness and pharisaic pomp she wends
her way to church. My compliment was taken almost as an insult. I was
then shown the ideal of China, a huge and hideous building, modelled on
the architecture which white men deem necessary to enable them to
support the tropical heat, to the fatal effects of which they are {296}
so sensitive; massive walls to carry the heavy roof; huge arched
verandahs where white people may get the breath of air they so need.
Of what use are all these to a race who cannot understand what you mean
when you speak of the heat being unhealthy, who, however sensitive to
cold and wet, flourish in the warmth to which they have been accustomed
all their lives? The Chinese do not admire this architecture for its
æsthetic effect; they care little about its heat-resisting qualities.
They like it because it is Western; because Western people are educated
in such buildings; because, I suppose, they expect Western learning to
work in some way through those massive stone walls to the minds of the
pupils; and because they fancy Western ideas would be more easily
understood in these hideous surroundings.
Thirdly, there is no serious effort made to get good teachers. At one
time, I understand, they had in their service a very remarkable body of
men--men like Professor Martin of Peking--whose knowledge was only
equalled by the sincerity of their purpose. Lately they have been
getting rid of these men as fast as they could, the cry of "China for
the Chinese" being perhaps responsible for this movement; and they have
endeavoured to replace them by Chinese subjects with but little
success. They have therefore fallen back again on foreigners, largely
on Japanese. These men are some of them very able and qualified
teachers; some, on the other hand, have had little or no experience of
teaching, and their inefficiency tends {297} to bring all foreign
teachers into disrepute. Not only must the teacher have a special
knowledge of the art of teaching, but a teacher of a race like the
Chinese, with different traditions to our own, must well understand
those traditions. We can best realise the enormous difficulty a
Chinese student has of learning from a Western teacher by remembering
how impossible it is for any of us to understand something that is put
from a Chinese point of view.
If the Chinese Government want efficient foreign teachers, they must
not pick up anybody, but they must hold out inducements to young men to
come as teachers, and must give them security of tenure. If, for
instance, the Chinese Government had in their service such an efficient
body of men as could be found in the mission schools, they would have
no difficulty. Another difficulty which stands in the way of the
Chinese schools is their want of discipline. One of the most
remarkable developments in China is the school strike. They have
undoubtedly extraordinary powers of united action, but the school
strike originates as much in the weakness of the teachers as it does in
the remarkable power the Chinese race has of united action; you hear of
it all over China, and it is sometimes ludicrous, sometimes serious.
One school struck because the foreign teachers required the pupils to
pass an examination of efficiency before they would give them a
testimonial. This was deemed most incorrect by the {298} scholars, who
held a doctrine which would be very attractive to our own
undergraduates, that residence alone was a sufficient qualification for
a degree. Many of the strikes take place for most occult reasons.
And this brings me to mission schools, for strikes take place equally
with them as in Government schools. They occur in boys' and in girls'
schools, and for the most un-understandable reasons. In one school the
strike began because a Chinese teacher caught hold of a boy's queue and
dragged him by it. The boy's "face" was injured, and his companions
made common cause. Another strike took place in a girls' school
because a girl was punished. Of course these strikes do not occur
where there is an efficient and vigorous teacher. It was attempted,
for instance, with Archdeacon Moule, but it only ended in the leaders
being caned. Still, one mission had its school practically ruined by
one of these strikes; it was the result of an intrigue by an
unbelieving teacher who had been employed by mistake. These strikes
are not a very great difficulty to the mission when it is in charge of
efficient and experienced men; a little justice and firmness apparently
soon disposes of any unreasonable resistance to authority, and tact and
knowledge prevent any friction which may result from regulations that
may be offensive to Chinese ideas.
A far greater difficulty in the mission schools is the question of
finance. The Chinese for the most part pay their scholars; the result
is that the mission school {299} has to compete not only against a free
school, but against a school in which pupils are paid to come, and it
appears as if it would be almost an impossibility for mission schools
to support themselves against such competition. As a matter of fact it
is usually found that so great a value do the Chinese put on the
efficient education that they receive in the mission school that they
are willing to pay a reasonable fee rather than be paid for the useless
education given by the Government school. Still it makes finance a
certain difficulty. Many of the schools are largely self-supporting;
others rely on fees to find board and lodgings for the pupils and the
salaries of the native teachers. So that every school more or less
carries a great financial burden.
The great difficulty of mission schools at the present time springs
partially from Government action. The ideal of every Chinaman is at
present to be in the service of the Government; we must emphasise that
word "at present," because undoubtedly, owing to the railway
development of China, a wealthy commercial class must arise all over
her land, as it has already risen in the great port towns. This class
will be independent of Government and will be the class that needs
Western education more than any other class, for they will be in
intimate contact with the West. But at present those who seek a higher
education hope for the most part for Government employment. One of the
rules of Government employment is that the officials shall on {300}
certain days repair to the various temples to represent the Emperor,
and it is naturally held that such action is impossible for a
Christian. Besides this, the Government makes it extremely hard if not
impossible for a Christian to go to its University at Peking. All
teachers and pupils in a Government school are required on the
Emperor's birthday to bow down or kow-tow to the tablet of Confucius.
Missionaries hold that such action is not consistent with the Christian
faith, and therefore the mission school is very loath to send its
Christian pupils on to the Government University.
It must, however, be stated that several Chinese scholars, including a
Christian, have indignantly denied that the kow-towing to the tablet of
Confucius implies anything more than the respect due to the greatest
thinker that China ever possessed. We had the privilege of being shown
over Peking University by an extremely able and pleasant Chinese
gentleman, a Christian. He showed us the tablet of Confucius and
explained to us the ceremony. It must be owned that externally there
was but little that one could associate with the idea of divinity. The
tablet was behind a glass case, and at first it suggested some sort of
educational apparatus. The desks were placed at right angles to it, so
that it did not actually occupy what could be regarded as the chief
place in the room. The gentleman who showed us over strenuously denied
that any of the pupils in Peking Government University could regard
{301} Confucius as God. None were admitted to the University except
those who were already well versed in the Chinese Classics, and they
knew perfectly well that in these Classics Confucius said that he had
no supernatural power; while the leading commentator on Confucius, the
man whose teaching had more than any other influenced modern
Confucianism, was avowedly an agnostic, and therefore, so far from
regarding the tablet as divine, it would be nearer the truth to say
that the greater bulk of the scholars disbelieve in the idea of God
altogether, or at any rate hold an agnostic position with regard to it.
When I put these difficulties to an eminent missionary the answer was,
yes, but by a late edict they have made Confucius equal to heaven and
earth, and so whatever doubts there were before have been resolved, and
the Chinese Government has decreed to Confucius divine honour. I put
this criticism to an able civil servant in the employ of the Chinese
Government, and he answered that that decree was really intended to
have the opposite effect. The Chinese are aware that they are as a
matter of fact relegating Confucius to a secondary place in education,
and they are therefore most anxious to propitiate the Confucian
scholars. They have compromised the matter much on the same system
that we use in the West with regard to some politician whose services
have been valuable, but who is actually a hindrance in the House of
Commons. Confucius has been given divine honours {302} as the worn-out
politician in England is given a peerage; it is a form of honourable
retirement. A very intellectual Chinese, however, expressed himself
quite otherwise, saying that anybody who understood Chinese views would
have grasped the meaning of making Confucius equal to heaven and earth.
As heaven and earth induce the wealth of mankind, so has Confucius done
by his teaching; as heaven and earth can change things and make things
exist that were not, so with Confucius; but that Chinese theology
regards heaven and earth as created by the one God, and therefore
Confucius is put in the position of an exalted but a created being.
What impresses perhaps the Westerner more than this rather recondite
Chinese reasoning is the simple fact that while by the Government edict
it is decreed that the tablet of Confucius shall be honoured by three
bowings and nine knockings, it is also ordained that the schoolmaster
shall be honoured by one bowing or kow-tow and three times knocking the
ground with the head. The similarity of the salute to the schoolmaster
and to the tablet of Confucius rather disposes of the idea that the act
of reverence to the tablet involves worship. On the other hand, it is
pointed out that this is the main ceremony that is observed in what are
called the temples of Confucius; but when this was put to a Chinaman,
his answer was that they were not temples, and if there had been any
worship in those temples, they would have been frequented {303} as much
by the women and children as by the men, but as a matter of fact they
were frequented only by literati. When it was suggested that on
occasion, however, there were sacrifices in these temples, he did not
deny this, but changed the subject.
But we must not say that the respect and reverence offered to
Confucius, whether it involves idolatry or not, is the only reason why
Christian pupils are advised not to go to the Government Universities.
There are two other great reasons. The first is an extremely practical
one: the education in Government Universities is avowedly imperfect.
The fact that the Government have subscribed to the English University
at Hong-Kong and to the German College in Shantung show that they are
aware of their own shortcomings. The second reason is that the racial
characteristics of Chinamen demand that they should act as a body. An
acute observer asserted that, as far as he was able to judge the
matter, no Chinaman ever acted independently; and that therefore it is
putting a burden greater than the race can bear to ask that Christians
should maintain their Christianity when they are surrounded by an
unbelieving and heathen atmosphere; and that, as a matter of fact, the
result of sending students to Government Universities would, except in
cases of men of very strong character, be to send them to unbelief.
Yet a greater and simpler objection is that these Government
Universities for the most {304} part do not exist, and that it is
impossible for small institutions like that at Peking to take even a
hundredth part of the students who are clamouring for Western
education. But the mission schools have another and a newer
difficulty, one which is causing the greatest heart-searching. This I
must reserve for the next chapter.
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