VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 19
Living Education, the Vat You Have to Be Yourself
This is the closing chapter of the stretch on education. Everything the last five chapters reasoned out has to be gathered back into the nine things in your hand. Time, energy, attention, relationships, trust, health, skill, reputation, feeling. The first section takes time and energy and attention, which are about where you put your heart. The second takes relationships and trust and health, the three you say not a word about and cannot hide. The third takes skill and reputation and feeling, down to the deepest layer. The nine together are the dye vat, and the three sections together drive the nineteenth stake.
The first section takes the first three. The four or five hours you have left in a day are the real soil, not the school's eight, and the same hours steep in one way that a grown-up comes home to a phone and in another that the things of a home are done together, so the education is not a squeezing out of more time but a spending of what you have. Your best two hours go mostly to the boss and the child gets the ash, so a question draws your fire and the next time he will not ask, and though you cannot give it all, two evenings a week you can, a thousand times present against a thousand times impatient making two people. And when he talks, where your eyes are is the fiercest thing of all, for the bond breaks not at sixteen but at eight, in two minutes you will not remember. Confucius said even dogs and horses are fed, and without respect where is the difference, and feeding costs money while respect costs time and energy and attention.
The second section takes the middle three, the three you cannot fake. What a child learns of relationships he learns not from how you treat him but from how you treat your mother and the man at the door and your partner and the friend behind his back, and Mencius said to extend it to the elders and young of others, the whole skill being that extending out to the one you could ignore, with the child watching. Trust starts small, in whether you kept the zoo promise, the broken word teaching him that a grown-up's word need not count, and Confucius said a man without trust, he did not know what he could do. And in health your words count for nothing and he watches what time you sleep, so that the Classic of Filial Piety, turned around, means that to wreck your own body is to teach him to wreck his. These three you say not a word about, and eighteen years cannot be performed.
The third section takes the last three, each deeper than the last. Skill, where the one you have handed to him yourself carries the temper of the hands a class cannot, as the good smith's son learns first to sew furs. Reputation, the faith piled from small things with the child watching, and the junzi ashamed to have his words run past his deeds, so say less and do more. And feeling, the deepest and least changeable, love and anger and grief and fear all steeped, the Chinese parent's soup always there and the words of love never, generation on generation, a chain that can break at you and only you, and a child three years in his parents' arms, so that the one held young knows how to hold. The nine together are the vat the child soaks in eighteen years, the color known already.
That is the nineteenth stake. Education is not in the school or the curriculum or any tool, but in how you spend the nine things in your hand, and how you live is what the child steeps, and this no one can do for you. So the stretch on education comes, after its wide circle, to one line, the vat you have to be yourself. But the matter is not finished, for the eighteenth chapter left a line unopened, that the fault is on those who set the tool in the person's square, and who makes it and sells it and governs it is all the work of people. From the next chapter, tools, from the beginning, from the wise create the thing.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Time, energy, attention
SECTION 2 Relationships, trust, health
SECTION 3 Skill, reputation, feeling
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.