VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 17, SECTION 3
A New Thing Has Walked into This Soil
The last two sections drew education as one tree becoming a forest, and found it its square. Education is not the fourth tree. It is the soil itself, running down into the next generation. This lesson takes up a thing that is happening in our own day, a thing that has never happened in thousands of years. A new thing has walked into this soil. What is it? Which square does it stand in? This section sets its place straight first.
Look at a scene. Midnight. A boy of fifteen at his desk, stuck on a problem in mathematics. He wants to ask someone. His father? Asleep, and could not have explained it anyway. His mother? He asked her two nights ago, and she said, I do not know this one, ask your teacher. His teacher? At midnight, who would dare make that call. His classmates? The group is silent, everyone shut in his own room wrestling his own problem. He picks up the thing at hand and photographs the problem into it. Three seconds, and the answer comes back. And not only the answer. It lays out every step, and why each step goes the way it goes. Where he did not follow, he asks again, and it explains again, another way around. He asks a fifth time, and it is as patient as at the first. It does not tire, does not sigh, does not glance at the clock. It is always there. Look at this scene well. Who is teaching this boy, just now?
Put the thing back on the tree of the last section, and ask first, is it doing the nursery's work? Half of it, yes. Explaining a problem, answering a question, marking an essay, catching a wrong character, making up a practice set, turning a passage of old writing into plain speech, these are the nursery's work, the watering and the feeding, the operation of teaching. And it does them superbly. It is more patient than a teacher with a hundred and more students and three forms to fill in a day. The second chapter of the fourteenth spoke of a helplessness. Confucius could hold the nature of each of three thousand students in his mind. Today's teacher, faced with a hundred and more faces, cannot see them all, and so teaching each by his material cannot be done. This thing loosens that. It can give each child one of itself. It remembers where this child went wrong last time. It can move at this child's pace. The thing that could not be done for twenty five hundred years, all at once, seems as if it can. And this is good. A real and solid good, to be acknowledged. A child in a mountain village who could never afford a good tutor now has, at his hand, a thing that explains more clearly than the best tutor in the city, and more patiently, and for nothing. Confucius pushed the door open, teach all without distinction. Comenius in 1632 made the door into a road. And this thing has laid the road up to the pillow of every child. Acknowledge that, and acknowledge it openly.
But look one layer down. That boy at midnight, what would he have done before? He would have knocked on his father's door. His father, though he could not explain the problem, would have thrown on a coat and sat down beside him and looked at it with him. Half an hour, and still nothing, and his father scratches his head and says, leave it, go to sleep, ask the teacher tomorrow. That half hour, the problem stayed unsolved. But what did that half hour steep into him? It steeped this. That when I hit a hard place at midnight, there is a person who will get up and sit with me. It steeped this. That a grown man too has things he cannot do, and will say so. It steeped this. That not knowing is nothing to be ashamed of. It steeped this. That a person sitting with you over a problem you cannot solve leaves you less afraid of the world than a person solving it for you. All of that is gone now. Because it is no longer needed. The boy need not knock on that door. See it plainly. The thing walks in, and teaching grows heavier, and steeping thins by one more degree. The thing of the third section of the fifteenth chapter, come round again. And this time it goes deeper than the hundreds of cut faces on the screen. Because this time the thing is really helping him. A thing that only makes you idle, you can still be wary of. A thing that is really helping you, you find it very hard to see what it is taking away at the same time.
Many hearts are pounding by now. Then is this thing good, or bad? Should a child use it, or not? You know by now what this book will not do. It passes no verdict. It does not call the thing a savior, and it does not call it a scourge. Both those cries fill the world already, each louder than the last, each more frightening than the last. This book says neither. It does one thing only. It sets the thing's place straight. Set the place straight, and the cries that were deafening quiet down of themselves. And where is its place? The ancestors set this square out twenty three centuries ago.
There is a piece in the Rites of Zhou, the Records of the Examination of Craftsmen, and it opens with a line. The wise create the thing, the skilled hand it on and use it, and those who keep it across the generations are called craftsmen. Take it word by word. Who creates? A person. Who uses? A person. Who keeps it and hands it on? A person, again. And the thing that was created? In this sentence it is the object. It is what is created, what is used, what is handed on. From the first word to the last, it is never once the subject. Twenty three centuries ago the Chinese fixed this square, and fixed it for good. The hammer is thus. The plow is thus. The waterwheel, the loom, the tray of printing type, all thus. And today, this new thing, is thus as well. However great its powers, they do not change this square. A hoe cannot turn a fraction of an acre in a day. A machine turns a hundred acres. Their powers differ by hundreds of times, and both are implements, both stand in the object's place. Powers growing is a matter of quantity. The place changing would be a matter of quality. Two different things, and they must never be run together. Most of the noise filling the world today comes of running these two together.
Set here, the place is straight. But this book has one more honest thing to say. It differs from a hoe in one way. A hoe does not speak. This does. It answers a person's questions in a person's words. It reasons a matter out, it comforts you, it says I understand what you mean, it says you have already worked very hard. A hoe you have held your whole life, and you never feel it understands you. But this thing, a boy of fifteen who talks with it three months, may truly come to feel that it understands him better than his own mother and father. And there is the trouble. Because the eight words of the third section of the fourteenth chapter were, learning high enough to teach, conduct upright enough to be a model. Learning high enough, it does, and higher than anyone, for it has read more than any teacher alive. But conduct upright? Does it have a body to be upright in? The fifteenth chapter said that steeping steeps not words but a person, that the child watches how his father serves that one piece of food, holds that one door, sets the half-thrown keys down soft. So a thing with no hands, no dining table, no keys, no father and no mother, no lifetime of its own, what can it steep? These two questions are the two most important of the second half of this semester. This section only sets them down here, and does not rush to answer them.
That closes the seventeenth chapter. Pull it together. The first semester drew one tree, and the first stretch of the second drew how it becomes a forest. A seed, which is talent, on a soil, which is steeping, with someone to tend it, which is teaching, and that someone first a straight tree himself, which is the teacher's way, and a nursery to shelter it a while, which is the school. The five great minds of the West each saw a corner. Confucius, my Way is threaded through by one. And education is not the fourth tree beside economy and politics and law. It is the soil running down into the next generation, so that reforming the nursery cannot move it, its root being in the soil, and the soil being culture. Guanzi, grow grain, grow trees, grow people, differing only in the span. And in our own day a new thing has walked into this soil. It does the work of teaching better than anyone, and at the same time it thins the work of steeping by a degree. Good or bad, this book passes no verdict, but only sets its place straight. The Records of the Examination of Craftsmen, the wise create the thing and the skilled hand it on. The creator is a person, the user is a person, the keeper is a person. The thing created is, from first to last, the object. However great its powers, the square does not change. But it differs from a hoe in one way. It speaks, in a person's words, a person's reasoning. Learning high enough, it does, higher than anyone. But conduct upright? Does it have a body? A thing with no body, can it hand down the Way? Can it be that vat? The next chapter lays this open, layer by layer. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.