VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 17
One Tree, and a Forest
The last three chapters laid the parts on the table, the school, talent, the teacher's way, teaching and steeping, the five great minds of the West. This chapter fits them back onto one tree, finds education its true square, and sets straight a new thing that has just walked into the soil.
The first section draws the tree. The first semester drew one tree, and one tree has one lifetime, so to live on it must bear seed and grow a second, and that becoming of a forest is education. Three things grow the next tree. The seed, which is talent, and a pine seed will not grow a willow however you tend it. The soil, which is steeping, and the child grows only what the soil allows, the soil that used to be the home and today is the screen. And the one who tends, which is teaching, clearing stones and propping the bent sapling and setting a straight stake beside it, who must first be a straight tree himself, which is the teacher's way, the hemp among which the mugwort stands straight unpropped. The school is a nursery, walled and bedded and grading its saplings, a good thing but not a forest, since the real soil that a tree roots in lies beyond it, and is yours. The five great minds each saw one corner of this, the nursery, the seed, the soil, the wall, the tower, while the ancestors saw the whole wood growing down the generations, threaded, as Confucius said, by one.
The second section finds education its square. Nearly everyone sets it beside economy and politics and law, a fourth block with its own office and budget, and that is the error, for it pulls education out of culture and sets it alongside. The thirteenth chapter held that economy and politics and law are three trees on the soil of culture. Education is not the fourth tree. It is the soil itself running down into the next generation, culture in the very act of handing itself on. This is why decades of reform change so little, since all of it is nursery work, the beds and the watering and the rulers, while the soil the forest grows in is culture and cannot be reformed, and the sixteen hours a day beyond the nursery, which no document reaches, are what steep the bedrock of a life. And this is no ranking of culture above the three, for positions differ in role and not in height, the soil no nobler than the tree, as Guanzi set out long ago, grow grain for a year, grow trees for ten, grow people for a lifetime, all needed, differing only in the span you plan for.
The third section takes up the new thing that has walked into the soil. A boy of fifteen, stuck at midnight, photographs his problem into the thing at hand, and in three seconds has the answer and every step of it, tireless and patient past any teacher, and this is a real good, a clear road laid to the pillow of every child. But look one layer down. Before, he would have knocked on his father's door, and the half hour they sat over the unsolved problem steeped into him that someone will get up for him, that a grown man too can not know and say so, that not knowing is no shame. That is gone, for it is no longer needed, and teaching grows heavier while steeping thins another degree, and this cuts deeper than the screen because the thing is really helping. This book passes no verdict, savior or scourge, but only sets the thing's place straight. The Records of the Examination of Craftsmen say the wise create the thing and the skilled hand it on, the creator a person, the user a person, the keeper a person, and the thing created always the object, never once the subject. However great its powers, the square holds, for growing powers is quantity and a changed place would be quality. But it differs from a hoe in one way. It speaks, in a person's words. Learning high enough it has, higher than anyone. But conduct upright, does it have a body to be upright in, and a thing with no body, what can it steep?
That is the seventeenth stake. Education is the whole of one tree becoming a forest, and it is not a fourth thing beside economy and politics and law but the soil running down to the next generation, its root in the soil and not the nursery. And a new thing has walked into that soil, an implement still, however great its powers, the object and never the subject, yet one that speaks, with learning high enough and no body to be upright in. The next chapter takes Han Yu's ruler to it, and measures whether a thing with no body can hand down the Way.
SECTION
SECTION 1 How one tree grows into a forest
SECTION 2 Which square education stands in
SECTION 3 A new thing has walked into this soil
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.