VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 15, SECTION 3
Teaching Grows Heavier, Steeping Drains Away
The last two sections named the two operations of handing down, teaching and steeping, and joined them into one path through the eight steps of the Great Learning. This section brings that down to our own day, and to a plain and troubling fact. In our time, the balance between the two has broken. Teaching keeps getting heavier, and steeping keeps draining away. This is the close of the chapter.
Look at how it has gone. The teaching side, the deliberate and measurable side, grows heavier every year. More on the curriculum, more class hours, more tutoring after school, more exams, more rankings, more targets. A child's day fills up, end to end, with teaching. And the steeping side, the deep and unmeasured side, drains away. The hours a family once spent simply together, the child soaking in how the adults talk and treat people and carry a hard day, get eaten by the teaching, by the homework and the screens and the drive to the next class. The child is taught more than any generation before him, and steeped less.
Why has it gone this way? For a reason the eighth chapter already laid bare. Teaching can be seen, and measured, and turned into targets and tests and rankings. Steeping cannot. You can put a number on how many words a child has learned. You cannot put a number on whether he was steeped in warmth. And a society that measures everything, and pours its care into whatever it can measure, will pour that care into teaching and let steeping go untended. It is the target sheet of the eighth chapter, come to the raising of children. The school drills the knowledge and the skill, the things a test can catch, and has neither the hours nor the eyes to spare for the deep steeping, the character, the warmth, the way a person treats a person. The family hands the teaching off to the tutor and the screen, and has less and less time left to simply be the vat the child soaks in.
And here is the danger in it. You can pile teaching as high as you like, and if steeping has drained away, the deep layers do not get handed down at all. The knowledge goes in, and the character does not. The skill goes in, and the warmth does not. You raise a generation heavy with what a test can measure and thin in what it cannot, a generation that knows a great deal and was steeped in very little. And that, in the language of the first semester, is exactly the soil where the crooked sprout grows. When steeping drains away, the seed of do not torment does not get passed on, and torment spreads. The root of the tree goes untended, precisely while the branches are pruned and measured and fussed over as never before.
So what is to be done? The answer is not to pile on more teaching. A class in character is still teaching, and it stays up at the shallow layers, a child who can recite the virtues and was steeped in none of them. The only way to restore steeping is the hinge of the last section, cultivating the person. The adults must become, themselves, the vat worth soaking in. Warm, fair, honest people, in front of the child, every day. This is the same thing the first semester came to rest on, living the hard bedrock, being a warm vat on the small patch of soil you can reach. Steeping cannot be taught. It can only be lived. And to hand down the deep things, the adults have first to be them.
That closes the fifteenth chapter. Pull it together. The handing down of a culture runs on two operations. Steeping, the deep and nameless one, where the child soaks up what the people around him simply are. And teaching, the deliberate one, joined to steeping through the eight steps of the Great Learning, hinged at the cultivating of the person, where what you were taught becomes what you are and what you are becomes what the next person soaks in. And in our own day the balance has broken, teaching grown heavy because it can be measured, steeping drained away because it cannot, so that a generation is taught much and steeped little, and the seed of do not torment goes unpassed. That is the fifteenth stake this chapter drives. Handing down has two operations, teaching and steeping, and steeping, the deeper, is the one our age is letting drain away, which only the becoming of the adults, not more lessons, can restore.
The last two chapters have stood on the ancestors, Confucius and the old books of learning. But the West, these last four hundred years, sent up some of the greatest minds it had on exactly this question, how a person is taught, and how a person is made. The next chapter calls five of them out, Comenius and Rousseau and Dewey and Illich and Foucault, and looks at how, coming by five different roads, they all stopped before the same wall. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.