VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 15
Teaching and Steeping
The last chapter said the true place of education is in the person. This chapter says that the handing down of a culture is not one operation but two. One is teaching, the deliberate thing. The other has never had a name, and it is the deeper. This chapter names it, steeping, and drives one stake across three sections.
The first section takes up steeping. The things that most make you who you are, your accent, your table manners, your sense of what is shameful, your instinct to warm or to guard, no one ever taught you. You soaked them up from the people around you, year after year, until they were no longer things you knew but things you were. That is steeping, the dyeing of the seventh chapter seen from the side of the silk, and it reaches the deep layers of the fifth chapter that teaching cannot, so that a child does not do what he was told but does what he was steeped in, and a warm home raises a warm child with no lesson in warmth while a lecture against torment loses to the vat the child soaks in.
The second section takes up teaching, and joins it to steeping through the eight steps of the Great Learning, the ladder that runs from investigating things and extending knowledge, to making the intention sincere and setting the heart right and cultivating the person, and out to ordering the family and governing the state and bringing peace to all under heaven. The first steps are teaching, outward and of the book. But at cultivating the person the ladder turns, for that step is not learned but become, worked down into what you are, the hinge where teaching turns into steeping. And the later steps are steeping run outward, since you order your family not by lecturing them but by being the person they soak in, which is why the ancestors set cultivating the person at the center of the eight.
The third section brings this to our own day, where the balance has broken. Teaching grows heavier every year, more curriculum and tutoring and exams and rankings, because it can be seen and measured and turned into targets, the target sheet of the eighth chapter come to the raising of children. And steeping drains away, because it cannot be measured, so the school drills what a test can catch and the family hands teaching off to the tutor and the screen with less time left to be the vat. The danger is a generation taught much and steeped little, knowing a great deal and steeped in almost nothing, which is exactly the soil where the crooked sprout grows and torment spreads. The cure is not more teaching, since a class in character is still teaching, but the becoming of the adults, warm and fair and honest people in front of the child every day, the living of the hard bedrock the first semester came to rest on. Steeping cannot be taught, only lived.
That is the fifteenth stake. Handing down has two operations, teaching and steeping, hinged at cultivating the person, and steeping, the deeper, is the one our age lets drain away, which only the becoming of the adults can restore. The last two chapters stood on the ancestors. The next calls out five of the modern West's great minds on education, Comenius and Rousseau and Dewey and Illich and Foucault, and looks at how, by five different roads, they all stopped before the same wall.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Teaching without teaching, the operation of steeping
SECTION 2 The operation of teaching, and the path of the Great Learning
SECTION 3 Teaching grows heavier, steeping drains away
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1 Teaching without teaching, the operation of steeping