Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/35

Rh lesson in a loud singsong until he reaches the end of his task or of his memory, when his voice suddenly drops from its high key like a June beetle striking a wall. The stimulus of companionship in study is denied, each pupil memorizes, recites and writes in a class by himself, even though many may be engaged on the same passages.

The preceptor is seldom over diligent. Without any personal interest save in the exceptional student, he simply keeps the mill going and is not expected to modify either the curriculum or the method of instruction. There is no variety, no adaptation to pupil, no room for pupil-judgment—only attention cultivated so highly that he can study without diversion amid the greatest din. The scholar must develop 'phonographic' abilities of memory; if not, there is no remedy except the rod. Recent native schools along more modern lines have swung to the other extreme and are entirely too lax, and there have been many instances in which the student body has presumed to run the school. The aversion to the old-style severity of the native teacher has been a primary cause of the frequent rebellions in foreign schools in China when a stand for faculty-power in proper discipline has had to be firmly though kindly taken.

Sons of shopkeepers and farmers and others who do not expect to enter the lists for literary honors, but merely to acquire a moderate proficiency in the native language, are put through a three- or four-year course in six elementary classics which the aspirant for a degree usually skips, beginning at once with the 'Four Books,' which may be studied also by the more clever of the lower class. Thus the literary graduate who turns pedagogue in an elementary school has himself probably never traversed as a student the texts he is to teach, though his knowledge of the superior classics renders this superfluous, except in the point of appreciating the scholars' difficulties.

Owing to the ideographic nature of the language, one aspect of Chinese education is practically beyond the ken of western peoples. Each character requires a distinct memory effort, and the recognition of its form and name is made to come at one stage of instruction, its meaning much later on.

Dr. Smith compares the aggregate bulk of the classics which must be accurately engraved on the child's memory with the Old Testament. No other writings have been ground into the memories of so many of earth's millions; and the precepts they contain have had such a determining effect in producing Chinese character that, under the risk of being tiresome, we shall pause to glance at their content.

1. The Trimetrical Classic, a mosaic with three characters in each clause, universally employed unchanged for eight and a half centuries. Its 1,068 words, or 534 different characters, deal with the nature of man and of numbers, necessity and modes of education, filial and fraternal duties, the names of the heavenly bodies, the three great powers, four seasons, four directions, five