VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 14, SECTION 1
What a School Is Actually Doing
The first semester, across thirteen chapters, looked at the tree of culture from its sickness down to its root, and looked it through. The first semester was about the root. The second semester is about the use. A bedrock, however hard, if it cannot be handed down, is a dead thing. So the first business of the second semester is handing down, is education. This chapter, across three sections, starts from a place that is in front of your eyes every day, and that you have never once looked at seriously. The school. This lesson asks only one question. This place, the school, what is it actually doing?
One. One sentence from a teacher
Start with a sentence heard secondhand. A revered teacher, when he was young, came to know some children who had been in a juvenile reformatory. Those children told him that the days inside were really much like boarding school. Three meals at set hours, getting up and going to bed at set times, someone minding them, someone teaching them, a crowd of others their own age around them, one routine, day after day, that nothing could shift. When the teacher told this, he was talking about the reformatory. But someone who heard it turned the sentence around in his head within a second. Turned around, it goes like this. The school may also be just like that place. Take a crowd of young people, ten-odd years old, still growing, with more strength than they can spend, not yet settled, and pen them into a yard with a wall, a timetable, and grown-ups in charge. The longest stretch of the day, they spend inside. Three meals at set hours. Getting up and going to bed at set times. Someone minding them. Someone teaching them. A crowd of others their own age around them. One routine, day after day, that nothing can shift. It keeps them from scattering into the streets and making trouble, and it lets the grown-ups at home go to work with their minds at ease.
As for teaching, that is one item that has been arranged inside it. Said out loud, this makes most people uncomfortable at first. How can you compare a school to a place like that? But here, please do not rush to argue back. First, hold this uncomfortable sentence in your heart for one minute. You know this book's way of writing well by now, from beginning to end. Lay out positions only, and pass no verdict. This is not to curse the school. It is to ask you to take off, for one second, the glasses that say "a school is of course a place for teaching," and to see, with the glasses off, what is actually going on in this yard.
Two. Looking at this yard, one layer at a time
Look at a morning as ordinary as mornings get. A father and a mother get up at half past six. At twenty past seven, the child goes out the door. At eight sharp, the child is in the classroom. The father and the mother, one rushing for the subway, one on an electric scooter, each head off to their own work station. They do not have to worry where the child is for the whole of this day, what he eats, who he is with. Because a place has caught him for them. Now peel this apart, layer by layer.
The first layer, minding. A child from six to eighteen, twelve whole years, needs somewhere to be during the day. No one is home, the grandparents cannot necessarily watch him every day, society has to keep turning, the parents have to work. This yard takes over those twelve years of daytime. This layer is as plain as plain gets, and yet go through every book on education and you will find few willing to write it down properly. Because it is too undignified. But it is real.
The second layer, keeping them out of trouble. Twelve to twenty two is the stretch of years in a person's life when his strength is fullest, his spirit highest, and he least knows how high the sky is or how deep the earth. Those ten years, if you scattered these young people into the streets, that strength they cannot spend would have to find somewhere to go. The school gathers them in, and that strength is worn away, bit by bit, by homework, exams, morning runs, clubs. Less trouble happens inside the yard than outside it. This layer too is seldom spoken of properly. But ask anyone who has been a headmaster, and he knows it clearly in his heart.
The third layer, grinding against others. Twelve years crammed into a yard with a crowd of others your age. How to queue, how to wait, how to put up with things, how to share a desk with someone you cannot stand, how to swallow it when you are wronged, how to team up with people and get a thing done, and also how to fight with them. Not one line of this is on the timetable. But look back, and the bedrock of how you have dealt with people all your life was mostly ground out in that yard.
The fourth layer, sifting. Exams, rankings, diplomas. Sifted down layer after layer, a crowd of children is split into different grades. That grade decides which door he can go through later, which chair he can sit in, what kind of life he will lead. This layer is spoken of most, but when people speak of it they put a dignified name on it, selecting talent. Strip off that dignified coat, and its plain shape is sifting. The fifth layer, teaching. Teaching knowledge, teaching ability, teaching how to think things through. Of everything said about education, this is the layer spoken of loudest, most, and most beautifully. It is the only function of this yard that is admitted in the open.
Five layers laid out. Look for yourself. Teaching is one of them.
Three. To see it clearly is not to curse it
At this point, some student will surely feel a weight on his chest. Then is the school not a fraud? It says it teaches, and really it minds children? No. This book has said from its first chapter, lay out positions only, and pass no verdict. These five layers are laid out here not to convict the school, but quite the opposite. Think about it. Without this yard, who would take those twelve years of daytime? Who would let that father and mother go to work? Where would that crowd of sixteen-year-olds put their strength? Every one of these five layers is a real need, and every one needs someone to carry it. This yard carried them. It has its merit. Seeing these five layers clearly is for something else. It is so as to stop counting on it for everything.
A parent who is convinced in his heart that a school is a place for teaching will think, as a matter of course, hand the child to the school, and the business of education is taken care of. If the child learns badly, it is the teacher's fault. If the child goes astray as a person, the school did not teach him well. And his own share is quietly set down. But look at those five layers. Most of this yard's strength goes into minding, managing, grinding, sifting, and what actually reaches the layer of teaching is already not much. And the deepest part of education, how a person conducts himself, how he treats others, how he holds firm when no one is looking, is the very thing this yard finds hardest to carry, and has least time to carry.
Once you see these five layers clearly, you will no longer hand the whole child over. You will know there is a big piece that was always yours to take on. This is what seeing this yard clearly is for. Not to curse it, but to take back the share that is yours to carry.
Four. What Confucius spoke of is another layer
So how did the ancestors speak of the school? Interestingly, when the ancestors spoke of education, they hardly spoke of the yard at all. They spoke of another layer. More than two thousand five hundred years ago, Confucius spoke four words.
Teach all, without distinction. — Confucius, the Analects, Wei Ling Gong
Teaching does not sort people by birth, by rank, by wealth. Whoever is willing to come and learn, he teaches. You have to set these four words back into Confucius's own years to know how heavy they are. In those days, the ones who could study were the sons of nobles. The children of common people could not even touch the door. Confucius pushed this door open. Among his students, it is said, some had been traders, some were too poor to eat, some had come from far away. He did not push a single one out.
The layer Confucius spoke of is spirit, is direction. Whom teaching should be open to, and how wide. And the five layers of this section are institution, are operation. What kinds of work a yard actually carries in a society. These two layers must never be mixed up. Mix them up, and two kinds of muddled people appear. One takes the institution for the spirit. He thinks that as long as the school is running, education is running, looks at none of the five layers, and once the child is sent in, considers it done. The other, having seen how rough the institution is, spits on the spirit along with it. Since the school is nothing but minding plus sifting, education itself is a con, so why learn at all.
Both are wrong. The spirit is the spirit, the door Confucius pushed open, which after two thousand five hundred years is still open. The institution is the institution, this walled yard, which carries five layers of work, and does them sometimes well and sometimes badly. Seeing the institution as it truly is can make you guard that spirit all the more seriously.
In Confucius's years there was no wall, no timetable, no diploma. He and his students sat under a tree, one asking and one answering. And education happened there, really and truly. What does that tell you? It tells you that education has never been the same thing as that yard. The yard came later, a convenient frame. Education itself is much older than this frame, and much deeper.
Five. The position this section sets, and the bridge to the next
This section did one thing. It looked clearly at this yard, the school.
A revered teacher said one sentence, and someone heard it turned around, for one second. That second took off the glasses that say "a school is of course a place for teaching." With them off, this yard really carries five layers of work. Minding, keeping them out of trouble, grinding against others, sifting, teaching. Teaching is one of them. Seeing these five layers clearly is not to curse it, but to take back the share that was always yours to carry. And Confucius's teach all, without distinction, is another layer. That is the spirit of education, not the institution of the school. Two thousand five hundred years ago there was no wall, and education happened all the same. Education has never been the same thing as that yard.
That is the start of the fourteenth stake of the second semester. The school carries five layers of work, and teaching is only one of them. The true place of education is not in the timetable of that yard. So where, then, is the true place of education? If it is not in the timetable, what is the one most important skill in education? The next section brings in Confucius, to speak of the skill he set firm two thousand five hundred years ago. Teaching each according to his material. And it takes up a line that has been drifting around among people these last couple of years, one that is very uncomfortable to hear. However hard a person is willing to work, in front of talent it may count for nothing. Should that line be believed or not? See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 2 Teaching each according to his material, and the matter of talent