VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 16
Five Branches, One Tree
The last three chapters stood on the ancestors. This one turns to the West, and calls out five great minds on education across four hundred years, Comenius, Rousseau, Dewey, Illich, Foucault, each of whom saw one true branch of the tree and stopped before the same wall.
The first section takes the earlier three. Comenius, in 1632, built the classroom the whole world still sits in, age-grouped, one textbook, one pace, and so freed education from the few's courtyard, a vast merit, but its root is uniformity, and where uniformity stands, teaching each by his material cannot, so he bought teach all at the cost of teach each. Rousseau, in 1762, saw that a child is not a small adult and should be followed, a great thing, but his next line passed a verdict, the child good and society dirty, which walls the child in and cannot then teach him to enter the world, where Mencius, from the same good nature, concluded instead to push the good outward. Dewey, in 1916, saw that education is life and should not be walled off, also great, but he folded teaching and steeping into one, and teaching thinned into activity while a scheduled, graded steeping stopped being steeping, so both fell through.
The second section takes the two who saw more fiercely. Illich, in 1971, saw that the school equated attending with being educated and made a person a permanent half-product, the thirty-year carpenter with no diploma taking orders from one who never held a chisel, and he saw it truly, but his cry was abolish it, and after the school is gone, who minds the child while parents work, who grinds the lone learner against other people, who sifts the poor child upward, four questions he answered none of. Foucault, in 1975, set school and prison and barracks and factory on one table and drew the tower that needs no one inside it while the watched still manage themselves, the tower now on the classroom's back wall, the same layer this book saw in the fourteenth chapter, but he went in from exposure and called it a shackle to throw off, where this book, having laid out the five layers of work, says that to see clearly is not to curse but to take back your own share. The same tower, and two landings, a verdict against a position, Confucius transmit and do not invent, Laozi teach without words.
The third section gathers the five. Each saw one true branch, and each hit the same wall, a stance, for to take a stance is to pick a team and see only your own side, which is why four hundred years turned over one theory after another with no one ever convinced. And a fair word is owed, neither puffed up nor belittled, for each of the five saw finer than we do and their merit cannot be wiped away, and yet each thing they saw the ancestors had laid out, on a whole tree and not a branch. Confucius set teach all beside teach each, the old book set nurture and remedy with the fires, the Great Learning kept teaching and steeping as two segments of one road, Han Yu held that where the Way is there the teacher is, and Confucius saw not only the tower but the road beyond it. The ancestors do not walk half because they do not work for one age, and a verdict is this generation's hoe while a position is the root of thousands of years, a difference of work and not of height.
That is the sixteenth stake. In teaching on education, a verdict narrows the road and ages in a century or two, while only a laid-out position goes far, so five saw a branch each and the ancestors laid out the whole tree. The next chapter draws that tree, and gathers the school, the talent, the teacher's way, teaching and steeping, and the five of our own age into one.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Comenius, Rousseau, Dewey, three who walked half the way
SECTION 2 Illich and Foucault, two who saw more fiercely
SECTION 3 Five branches, and the whole tree
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1 Comenius, Rousseau, Dewey, three who walked half the way