Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/644

626 classes, so much admired in our Western school systems, and to those arts of 'reading in concert' which are believed to have such virtue in our democratic culture.

"It would in fact be difficult to imagine a better outward symbol of the mental status produced by these processes of an excessive organization, so widely admired in the public schools of America. They tend to destroy all possibility of original force. Beading, for instance, is becoming reduced to as purely mechanical a conformity to prescribed tone, time, and emphasis, as the Chinese custom of repeating words after the teacher has produced without any organization whatever. Chinese boys, rocking out their parrot tones, eagerly copying the master, or 'backing the books,' do but openly confess, in their noisy routine of imitation, the mental slavery which our prevailing system disguises under the varnish of a 'drill.' 'Reading in concert' has played its part in the Chinese system also, with effects upon voice and manner which we need not cross the hemisphere to find in full operation.

"Concerning 'imitation' as a principle of culture, let us add that, false as it is, its moral quality at least is higher when it follows, as in China, a type that does not change with human caprice, than when it is subject to arbitrary crudities and idiosyncrasies imposed on the pupils by individual teachers. In both cases, however, the real ultimate reference is to an all-powerful authority in that public sentiment and common belief of which these educational systems are meant to be the expression. And when this public control has become all pervading, as it steadily tends to be, whether as Chinese tradition of ages, or American fashion of the hour, its effect through imitation, in leveling and trimming young minds into a dull, self-satisfied uniformity, is indisputable. In the course of ages it has cast all Chinamen in one mould, and made their intellectual productions as monotonous as their physical type. The warning is for us, even at the opposite pole of social and political character."

Of moral education the author says: "More prominent than rote-work in the programme of the school system is respect for moral laws as eternal and divine. Modesty and humility; reverence for the old; the evil of war and the wickedness of cruelty and conquest; the love of truth, purity, and self-restraint; delicacy of feeling, devotion to duties, fidelity to functions—are the burden of this popular teaching, the very substance of text and precept. I believe, not only that the whole series of reading-books used in the schools of China does not contain a single impure precept, but that there is scarcely one noble conception of duty and humanity that cannot be found represented in the daily recitations of these children of a grand ethical literature, who are taught to prize it, not with slavish superstition, but for the naturalness of its ideal. Nor does this textual teaching fail of a practical basis in the home. It would be difficult to find any treatise on home education more admirable than the 'Instructions of the Sacred Edict,' whose utilitarian wisdom is here overflowed by tenderest sentiment."

In regard to Chinese education in manners, Mr. Johnson remarks: "As the moral relations are expressed in a concrete ideal, in which no change is supposed possible, so they are embodied in rites and ceremonies which share their sacredness. As the child learns ideas in the form of actual written characters, so he conceives duties in the form of strictly-regulated actions. Hence the prime importance of the 'proprieties' in education. They are not affectations, but recognized as the natural order of conduct, the virtue of behavior. . . . The authority of fixed rules of behavior, while scarcely more absolute than that of fashion in Western society, is not, like fashion, detached from the highest law of ethics and faith, but is strictly identical with it. To the Chinese, their ceremonial is simply man in his manifold relations. Its minute rules, which appear to exhaust the possibilities of prescription, are believed to express man's normal relations to the universe. They seem, in fact, to have historically grown out of the national consciousness of these relations, instead of being imposed by arbitrary authority or transient will. What they correspond with in Western life is not our etiquette, red tape, or religious formalism, but such conformities as are admitted by all of us to be natural, proper to all right