Part 18 (1/2)

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 inst.i.tution 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 pa.s.ses 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 ent.i.tled 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 doc.u.ments 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 cla.s.sics, 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sage 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 cla.s.ses 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 inst.i.tution 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 const.i.tute 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 lat.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 compa.s.s, 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 att.i.tude 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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.