VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 14, SECTION 2
Teaching Each According to His Material, and the Matter of Talent
The last section said the true place of education is not in the curriculum but in the person. And if it is the person that teaches, the first thing is to see the person being taught. Not children in general, but this particular child, made of this particular material. Twenty five centuries ago Confucius already taught this way, and had a word for it. Teaching each according to his material. This section takes up that, and the matter of talent.
There is a famous scene in the Analects. Two of Confucius's students, one after the other, put him the very same question. If I learn that a thing is right, should I go and do it at once? To the first, a bold and headlong young man named Zilu, Confucius said, no. Your father and your elder brother are still living. How can you go and do it at once, without asking them? To the second, a hesitant and holding-back young man named Ranyou, Confucius said, yes. Learn that it is right, and go and do it at once. A third student, standing by, was baffled. The same question, and two opposite answers. He asked Confucius why. And Confucius said, Ranyou holds himself back, so I urged him forward. Zilu takes on too much, so I reined him in.
The same question, opposite answers, because the two were different material. This is teaching each according to his material. Education is not one shape poured over every child alike. It is seeing the material of this particular child, and working with that. The bold one is reined in, the timid one is spurred, and each is brought a step closer to standing straight. A teacher who gives every child the same push is not teaching. He is stamping.
The old book on learning carried this further, into what it called nurturing the strengths and remedying the failings. Learners, it said, have four faults, and a teacher must know them. Some fail by taking in too much, some by taking in too little, some by rushing ahead too easily, some by stopping short and giving up. These four come from the fact that no two hearts are the same. Know the child's heart, and then you can remedy his fault. And so teaching, it said, is nothing other than this, nurturing what is strong in a person and remedying what fails in him. Mark that it does not say a teacher pours knowledge in. It says a teacher grows what is already there and mends what is weak. The child is not an empty jar to be filled. He is a seed, with a shape of his own, and the teacher's work is to help that particular seed grow into what it can be.
Which brings up the matter of talent. Every child comes made of different material. One takes to numbers, one to words, one to working with the hands, one to reading people. To teach according to the material is to see, first, what this child is made of, and then to grow him along the grain of it, rather than force every seed into the one shape the timetable prefers. And here again is why the true place of education is in the person. A curriculum cannot see a child. Only a person can see a child. The reining in of the bold one and the spurring of the timid one cannot be written into any syllabus. It can only be done by a teacher who has looked, closely, at the one child in front of him, and seen what he is made of.
So here is where this section leaves us. Confucius taught each according to his material, giving the bold Zilu and the hesitant Ranyou opposite answers to the same question, reining in the one and spurring the other, because they were different material. The old book on learning called it nurturing the strengths and remedying the failings, knowing that learners fail in four different 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. That carries the fourteenth stake deeper. Education must see the particular person, and only a person can see a person. So what makes a teacher able to do this deep work? The next section takes up the old eight-word line, learning high enough to teach, conduct upright enough to be a model. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 3 Learning high enough to teach, conduct upright enough to be a model