VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 14, SECTION 3

VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 14, SECTION 3

Learning High Enough to Teach, Conduct Upright Enough to Be a Model

The last section was about teaching each according to his material. But seeing clearly what material a child is made of, nurturing his strengths and remedying his failings, that skill needs a particular person standing there before it can be used. This section is about that person. The teacher. This lesson takes up only eight words. You have heard them since you were small, and most likely they are painted on a wall of your old school. But you may never have thought how heavy they are: learning high enough to teach, conduct upright enough to be a model.

One. Eight words, two gates

These eight words were set down by an educator of modern times, Tao Xingzhi.

Learning high enough to teach, conduct upright enough to be a model. — Tao Xingzhi

Eight words, two gates. The first gate, learning high. You must have something real in your own belly before you can teach something real. If you only half understand it yourself and you step up to the lectern, what comes out is bound to be dry, empty, unable to stand up to a second question. Students have sharp eyes. Whether a teacher has the goods, they have figured out in three lessons. The second gate, conduct upright. You must be able to stand on your own feet before you are fit to be anyone's model. See, these two gates do not stand side by side. The first is about whether you can teach. The second is about whether you deserve to teach.

People with high learning are actually not few. Open the staff list of any school, and the degrees, the titles, the papers, each is more impressive than the last. But upright conduct is another matter. It is not written on the staff list, it does not show in a title, and there is no exam that can test it. It shows in one place only: how this person himself lives. Tao Xingzhi spent his whole life doing these words, conduct upright enough to be a model, for people to see. He turned down a perfectly good professorship, went off to the countryside to run schools, lived in the plainest of rooms himself, and ate with the children of farmers. He was not lecturing on the teacher's way. He was doing the teacher's way.

This is the weight of the word model in conduct upright enough to be a model. Model here is not a model essay, a thing you memorize and copy out. Model means a mold. It means you yourself, the person, have become that mold. The students watch you every day, one year, two years, ten years, and little by little they are cast from that mold. The seventh chapter of the first semester told of Mozi standing before the dye vat and saying: dyed in blue, it turns blue; dyed in yellow, it turns yellow. The position of teacher is a dye vat. The child soaks in it, and whatever color you are, that is the color he comes out. This layer has little to do with what you said.

Two. Han Yu splits the teacher's way into three layers

Of the ancestors, the one who said this most clearly was Han Yu. More than twelve hundred years ago he wrote an essay, On the Teacher, and its first line is:

A teacher is the one who hands on the Way, imparts the craft, and resolves doubts. — Han Yu, On the Teacher

The position of teacher does three things: hands on the Way, imparts the craft, resolves doubts. Imparting the craft is putting knowledge and skill into the student's hands. How to solve this problem, how to recite this text, how to write out this prescription, how to draft this legal complaint. This layer can be taken apart, explained clearly, taught over and over. Resolving doubts is untying the knots in the student's heart. Why this step goes this way, why that rule was set like that. This layer is reasoning, and it too can be explained.

Handing on the Way is the hardest to explain. What is the Way? The Way is the ruler in a person's heart when he meets something with no standard answer. It is the boundary by which he knows what should be done and what should not. It is the line he still holds when no one is watching. This layer is not knowledge, not skill, not reasoning. It is something a person grows slowly, out of a whole life of experience, of responsibility carried, of losses taken, of wrongs owned up to.

And Han Yu put it first. Why first? Because the other two layers can be got elsewhere. Knowledge is in books; reasoning, you can ask someone. But the Way, where do you get it? You can only get it by watching a particular person. The student watches how the teacher speaks to a child with poor grades; how he nods to the person who comes into the office to mop the floor; how he bears it when he is wronged; how, when he said something wrong, the first thing he does on walking in the next day is admit it in front of the whole class. Not one of these is on the timetable. But these are the Way. Han Yu said something even harsher:

No matter high or low, no matter old or young, where the Way is, there the teacher is. — Han Yu, On the Teacher

Where the Way is, there the teacher is. If a person has the Way in him, he is your teacher, old or young, high or low. If a person has no Way in him, then however grand his title, he is not.

Three. The Record of Learning: memorize-and-recite learning is not enough to make a teacher

The Record of Learning speaks of the teacher's way with even less mercy.

Learning that is only memorized and recited is not enough to make one a teacher of others. — the Book of Rites, the Record of Learning

Learning that is just what you memorized is not fit to make you anyone's teacher. What is memorize-and-recite learning? It is when you have never really chewed a thing, digested it, lived it, but only learned other people's words by heart and spat them back out as they were. A teacher like that can talk his whole life, and what he says will all be dry, dead, without warmth. The students take it into their hands, and for them too it is dry and dead. A dead thing, handed on for a hundred years, is still dead. The Record of Learning has another line, set even higher:

Only when one knows how teaching rises, and also knows how teaching falls, can one be a teacher of others. — the Book of Rites, the Record of Learning

You must know what education stands up on, and also how it falls apart. Only then are you fit to be a teacher. What is this line saying? It is saying a teacher cannot just understand his own subject. He has to understand the thing called "teaching" itself: when something has really been handed down, and when it was only a lively going-through-the-motions. If he cannot see this layer clearly, he is only a porter.

When the ancestors spoke of the teacher's way, they spoke of four things. Learning, which is Han Yu's high learning, and the Record of Learning's knowing the patterns of education. Person, which is Tao Xingzhi's conduct upright enough to be a model. Way, which is Han Yu putting the handing on of the Way first. Living, which is the Record of Learning's memorize-and-recite learning is not enough to make a teacher, you must have lived it yourself. Learning, person, Way, living. For more than two thousand years, it has stood on these four words.

Four. Today, why the layer of handing on the Way is thinning

Now look back at today. A young teacher gets to school at half past seven in the morning and leaves at seven at night. In those twelve hours, what is he doing? Preparing lessons, teaching, marking homework, setting tests, marking tests, filling in forms, handing in paperwork, getting through inspections, holding parent meetings, answering parents' messages. What is he assessed on? The class average, the pass rate, the excellence rate, the rate of going on to higher school. All of these sit in the two layers of imparting the craft and resolving doubts.

And handing on the Way? What effect a teacher has had on how a student grows up as a person, how do you measure that? How do you score it? How do you write it into the year-end form? You cannot measure it. So it is not assessed. So on that packed timetable, it has no position. It is not that teachers do not want to hand on the Way. It is that they cannot even squeeze out the time to sit down with one student and talk properly for ten minutes.

There is a deeper layer still. Many of the young teachers at the lectern today were themselves measured out by that one uniform ruler. From primary school to university, what they learned was how to answer questions, how to raise scores, how to get into the top schools. All along that road, no one ever stopped to tell them what the Way is. The color in their own vat is pale. A person who was never dyed through himself, you ask him to dye the next generation, and what is he to dye them with?

This layer is not his fault. Here it is only laid out. Once you see it clearly, you know this: the person who truly handed the Way to you was most likely not the one standing at the lectern holding the pointer. It may be a teacher you only thought of again many years after you graduated. He never taught you any grand principle. Only once, when you were wrongly accused and the whole class was laughing at you, he stopped in the doorway and said one sentence: I know it wasn't you. That one sentence, you have remembered for thirty years. That is the Way. It never appeared on any exam paper.

Five. The position this section sets, the fourteenth stake, and the bridge to the next chapter

The three sections of the fourteenth chapter end here, and this layer is driven in.

This section was about the teacher's way. Tao Xingzhi's eight words: learning high enough to teach, conduct upright enough to be a model. High learning is whether you can teach; upright conduct is whether you deserve to teach. The position of teacher is a dye vat, and whatever color you are, that is the color the child comes out. Han Yu split the teacher's way into three layers, handing on the Way, imparting the craft, resolving doubts, and put handing on the Way first, because knowledge is in books and reasoning can be asked for, but the Way alone can only be got by watching a particular person. The Record of Learning adds two lines: memorize-and-recite learning is not enough to make a teacher; one who does not understand how education rises and how it falls is not fit to be a teacher. Learning, person, Way, living, four words, and for more than two thousand years it has stood here. And today, assessment lands only on the two layers of imparting the craft and resolving doubts, and the layer of handing on the Way is thinning.

Put the three sections together, and the fourteenth stake is driven in here: a school carries five layers of work, and teaching is only one of them; the true skill of education is seeing clearly each person's material, nurturing his strengths and remedying his failings; and the one who does this can only be a particular person who stands upright. The true position of education is not in the timetable. It is in the person.

Now, teaching is only one half of how a culture is handed down. The other half is the teaching that does not teach, the kind where a child soaks in your home for eighteen years, you never once open your mouth to teach him, and he learns all of it anyway. The next chapter takes up these two operations: teaching, and steeping. It also takes up something happening quietly today: teaching is getting heavier, and steeping is draining away. See you in the next chapter.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.

Chapter 15  Teaching and Steeping, the Two Workings by Which Culture Is Handed Down