VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 14
The True Place of Education Is Not in the Curriculum
The first semester laid the root, and the second puts it to use, beginning with the first road by which a bedrock gets handed down, education. This opening chapter takes up its true place, and drives one stake across three sections. The true place of education is not in the curriculum. It is in the person.
The first section looks at what a school is actually doing. A revered teacher once passed on what some boys who had been through a juvenile reformatory told him: life inside was not much different from boarding at school. Someone turned that sentence around for one second, and that second took off the glasses that say a school is, of course, a place for teaching. With the glasses off, the yard is plainly carrying five layers of work: minding, keeping them out of trouble, grinding against others, sifting, and teaching. Teaching is only one of them. Seeing the five clearly is not to curse the school. It is to take back the share that was yours to carry all along, and not hand the whole child over. And Confucius's teach all, without distinction, is the spirit of education, not the institution of the school. Twenty-five centuries ago there were no walls, and education happened all the same.
The second section brings in Confucius teaching each according to his material. Asked the same question, whether to act at once on what one learns, he told the bold Zilu to wait and the hesitant Ranyou to go ahead, reining in the one and spurring the other because they were different material. The old book on learning called this nurturing the strengths and remedying the failings, knowing that learners fail in four ways and that a teacher must know the child's heart to mend it, so that teaching grows the seed rather than fills the jar. And the matter of talent is that each child is different material to be grown along its own grain, which only a person, never a curriculum, can see.
The third section takes up an old eight-word line, learning high enough to teach and conduct upright enough to be a model. The first half, knowing the subject, is plain. The second is the deeper, for a teacher teaches by what he is, his own person the real textbook the children read every day. A teacher who lectures on honesty and fudges a grade teaches dishonesty into the bone, and one who treats the sweeper with courtesy teaches respect without a word. This is teaching by one's person over teaching by words, going in at the deep layers because the children soak in it, a vat that dyes them its color, which is why the upright conduct weighs more than the high learning.
That is the fourteenth stake. The true place of education is not in the curriculum but in the person. And handing down turns out to be not one operation but two, teaching, the deliberate thing, and a second that has never had a name, the children soaking in what the teacher simply is. The next chapter names that second operation and sets teaching and steeping side by side.
SECTION
SECTION 1 What a school is actually doing
SECTION 2 Teaching each according to his material, and the matter of talent
SECTION 3 Learning high enough to teach, conduct upright enough to be a model
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.