Changing China

by William Gascoyne-Cecil; Lady Florence Mary Cecil

CHAPTER XXIV

DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF EDUCATION

The difficulties in the way of education differ in Government schools and in Mission schools. If the Chinese Government could unite the Government schools to the Mission schools, they would overcome all these difficulties, and they would have a most perfect system of Western education. Of all the difficulties lying in the way of Government schools, first and foremost is the fundamental weakness of China, that weakness which is endangering her national existence, a weakness which I fear she will never completely surmount until she accepts a higher ideal. For her weakness is the universal greed for gain. Resident after resident reported the same cause of weakness, that a Chinaman cannot resist taking his "squeeze"—that is, his commission. It is not of course so dishonest as it would be on our side of the globe, because a Chinaman is more or less avowedly paid by these commissions, and therefore in many ways they are rather equivalent to the fees paid by an Englishman to a Government office than to illicit commissions, the acceptance of which in this country is punishable by law. If it is not as immoral, it is almost as deleterious to efficiency, because it tends to make officials unreasonable in their action. To ask the reason why things are done in China, is always to receive the answer that somebody got a "squeeze" thereby.

And so it is with education. As we wandered through room after room filled with apparatus sufficient to teach thousands of students, and of such a complicated nature as absolutely to confuse those students when taught, one longed that a tithe of this expenditure could have been used for that modicum of apparatus which is necessary to make not a few mission schools thoroughly efficient. Much of the apparatus has never got outside its packing cases, and perhaps a great deal had better permanently remain there, for nothing is so subversive to the proper teaching of men whose great defect is that they have never handled things with their hands, as to give them complicated apparatus to demonstrate the most recondite laws of science. A great scientific teacher, when consulted about the apparatus necessary for elementary science, advised plenty of bonnet wire, glass tubes, and one or two other little things of that sort. When one asks why the Chinese have been so lavish in their expenditure on apparatus which they cannot and will not use, the reply is the same old answer—somebody got a commission. Bui I think beyond that there is a real belief that education is a matter of expensive apparatus—a belief which is not altogether unknown on this side of the globe.

This brings me to the second great difficulty in the path of Government education. They will believe that an efficient education results rather from having an expensive building than from a competent teacher. I have before had occasion to refer to the extreme simplicity of the life of the Chinese. Many of the schools were housed, and very comfortably housed, in Chinese houses. The Chinese house always looks out on a courtyard, and courtyard is joined to courtyard by passages. The rooms are only divided from the courtyard by carved wooden screens whose interstices are sometimes filled with paper and sometimes not. They are eminently sanitary—in fact, to a large extent they fulfil the requirements of the "open-air cure." In one case in the courtyard were a lot of basins and ewers, and the boys were compelled to have a wash, which if extensive must, in the winter, have been extremely unpleasant. For all this I expressed my sincere admiration to my friend the Director of Education, but he received my compliment much in the same spirit with which a mother accepts your assertion that her child is far prettier in her every-day dress with tousled hair than she is in her Sunday clothes, as with hideous tidiness and pharisaic pomp she wends her way to church. My compliment was taken almost as an insult. I was then shown the ideal of China, a huge and hideous building, modelled on the architecture which white men deem necessary to enable them to support the tropical heat, to the fatal effects of which they are so sensitive; massive walls to carry the heavy roof; huge arched verandahs where white people may get the breath of air they so need. Of what use are all these to a race who cannot understand what you mean when you speak of the heat being unhealthy, who, however sensitive to cold and wet, flourish in the warmth to which they have been accustomed all their lives? The Chinese do not admire this architecture for its æsthetic effect; they care little about its heat-resisting qualities. They like it because it is Western; because Western people are educated in such buildings; because, I suppose, they expect Western learning to work in some way through those massive stone walls to the minds of the pupils; and because they fancy Western ideas would be more easily understood in these hideous surroundings.

Thirdly, there is no serious effort made to get good teachers. At one time, I understand, they had in their service a very remarkable body of men—men like Professor Martin of Peking—whose knowledge was only equalled by the sincerity of their purpose. Lately they have been getting rid of these men as fast as they could, the cry of "China for the Chinese" being perhaps responsible for this movement; and they have endeavoured to replace them by Chinese subjects with but little success. They have therefore fallen back again on foreigners, largely on Japanese. These men are some of them very able and qualified teachers; some, on the other hand, have had little or no experience of teaching, and their inefficiency tends to bring all foreign teachers into disrepute. Not only must the teacher have a special knowledge of the art of teaching, but a teacher of a race like the Chinese, with different traditions to our own, must well understand those traditions. We can best realise the enormous difficulty a Chinese student has of learning from a Western teacher by remembering how impossible it is for any of us to understand something that is put from a Chinese point of view.

If the Chinese Government want efficient foreign teachers, they must not pick up anybody, but they must hold out inducements to young men to come as teachers, and must give them security of tenure. If, for instance, the Chinese Government had in their service such an efficient body of men as could be found in the mission schools, they would have no difficulty. Another difficulty which stands in the way of the Chinese schools is their want of discipline. One of the most remarkable developments in China is the school strike. They have undoubtedly extraordinary powers of united action, but the school strike originates as much in the weakness of the teachers as it does in the remarkable power the Chinese race has of united action; you hear of it all over China, and it is sometimes ludicrous, sometimes serious. One school struck because the foreign teachers required the pupils to pass an examination of efficiency before they would give them a testimonial. This was deemed most incorrect by the scholars, who held a doctrine which would be very attractive to our own undergraduates, that residence alone was a sufficient qualification for a degree. Many of the strikes take place for most occult reasons.

And this brings me to mission schools, for strikes take place equally with them as in Government schools. They occur in boys' and in girls' schools, and for the most un-understandable reasons. In one school the strike began because a Chinese teacher caught hold of a boy's queue and dragged him by it. The boy's "face" was injured, and his companions made common cause. Another strike took place in a girls' school because a girl was punished. Of course these strikes do not occur where there is an efficient and vigorous teacher. It was attempted, for instance, with Archdeacon Moule, but it only ended in the leaders being caned. Still, one mission had its school practically ruined by one of these strikes; it was the result of an intrigue by an unbelieving teacher who had been employed by mistake. These strikes are not a very great difficulty to the mission when it is in charge of efficient and experienced men; a little justice and firmness apparently soon disposes of any unreasonable resistance to authority, and tact and knowledge prevent any friction which may result from regulations that may be offensive to Chinese ideas.

A far greater difficulty in the mission schools is the question of finance. The Chinese for the most part pay their scholars; the result is that the mission school has to compete not only against a free school, but against a school in which pupils are paid to come, and it appears as if it would be almost an impossibility for mission schools to support themselves against such competition. As a matter of fact it is usually found that so great a value do the Chinese put on the efficient education that they receive in the mission school that they are willing to pay a reasonable fee rather than be paid for the useless education given by the Government school. Still it makes finance a certain difficulty. Many of the schools are largely self-supporting; others rely on fees to find board and lodgings for the pupils and the salaries of the native teachers. So that every school more or less carries a great financial burden.

The great difficulty of mission schools at the present time springs partially from Government action. The ideal of every Chinaman is at present to be in the service of the Government; we must emphasise that word "at present," because undoubtedly, owing to the railway development of China, a wealthy commercial class must arise all over her land, as it has already risen in the great port towns. This class will be independent of Government and will be the class that needs Western education more than any other class, for they will be in intimate contact with the West. But at present those who seek a higher education hope for the most part for Government employment. One of the rules of Government employment is that the officials shall on certain days repair to the various temples to represent the Emperor, and it is naturally held that such action is impossible for a Christian. Besides this, the Government makes it extremely hard if not impossible for a Christian to go to its University at Peking. All teachers and pupils in a Government school are required on the Emperor's birthday to bow down or kow-tow to the tablet of Confucius. Missionaries hold that such action is not consistent with the Christian faith, and therefore the mission school is very loath to send its Christian pupils on to the Government University.

It must, however, be stated that several Chinese scholars, including a Christian, have indignantly denied that the kow-towing to the tablet of Confucius implies anything more than the respect due to the greatest thinker that China ever possessed. We had the privilege of being shown over Peking University by an extremely able and pleasant Chinese gentleman, a Christian. He showed us the tablet of Confucius and explained to us the ceremony. It must be owned that externally there was but little that one could associate with the idea of divinity. The tablet was behind a glass case, and at first it suggested some sort of educational apparatus. The desks were placed at right angles to it, so that it did not actually occupy what could be regarded as the chief place in the room. The gentleman who showed us over strenuously denied that any of the pupils in Peking Government University could regard Confucius as God. None were admitted to the University except those who were already well versed in the Chinese Classics, and they knew perfectly well that in these Classics Confucius said that he had no supernatural power; while the leading commentator on Confucius, the man whose teaching had more than any other influenced modern Confucianism, was avowedly an agnostic, and therefore, so far from regarding the tablet as divine, it would be nearer the truth to say that the greater bulk of the scholars disbelieve in the idea of God altogether, or at any rate hold an agnostic position with regard to it. When I put these difficulties to an eminent missionary the answer was, yes, but by a late edict they have made Confucius equal to heaven and earth, and so whatever doubts there were before have been resolved, and the Chinese Government has decreed to Confucius divine honour. I put this criticism to an able civil servant in the employ of the Chinese Government, and he answered that that decree was really intended to have the opposite effect. The Chinese are aware that they are as a matter of fact relegating Confucius to a secondary place in education, and they are therefore most anxious to propitiate the Confucian scholars. They have compromised the matter much on the same system that we use in the West with regard to some politician whose services have been valuable, but who is actually a hindrance in the House of Commons. Confucius has been given divine honours as the worn-out politician in England is given a peerage; it is a form of honourable retirement. A very intellectual Chinese, however, expressed himself quite otherwise, saying that anybody who understood Chinese views would have grasped the meaning of making Confucius equal to heaven and earth. As heaven and earth induce the wealth of mankind, so has Confucius done by his teaching; as heaven and earth can change things and make things exist that were not, so with Confucius; but that Chinese theology regards heaven and earth as created by the one God, and therefore Confucius is put in the position of an exalted but a created being. What impresses perhaps the Westerner more than this rather recondite Chinese reasoning is the simple fact that while by the Government edict it is decreed that the tablet of Confucius shall be honoured by three bowings and nine knockings, it is also ordained that the schoolmaster shall be honoured by one bowing or kow-tow and three times knocking the ground with the head. The similarity of the salute to the schoolmaster and to the tablet of Confucius rather disposes of the idea that the act of reverence to the tablet involves worship. On the other hand, it is pointed out that this is the main ceremony that is observed in what are called the temples of Confucius; but when this was put to a Chinaman, his answer was that they were not temples, and if there had been any worship in those temples, they would have been frequented as much by the women and children as by the men, but as a matter of fact they were frequented only by literati. When it was suggested that on occasion, however, there were sacrifices in these temples, he did not deny this, but changed the subject.

But we must not say that the respect and reverence offered to Confucius, whether it involves idolatry or not, is the only reason why Christian pupils are advised not to go to the Government Universities. There are two other great reasons. The first is an extremely practical one: the education in Government Universities is avowedly imperfect. The fact that the Government have subscribed to the English University at Hong-Kong and to the German College in Shantung show that they are aware of their own shortcomings. The second reason is that the racial characteristics of Chinamen demand that they should act as a body. An acute observer asserted that, as far as he was able to judge the matter, no Chinaman ever acted independently; and that therefore it is putting a burden greater than the race can bear to ask that Christians should maintain their Christianity when they are surrounded by an unbelieving and heathen atmosphere; and that, as a matter of fact, the result of sending students to Government Universities would, except in cases of men of very strong character, be to send them to unbelief. Yet a greater and simpler objection is that these Government Universities for the most part do not exist, and that it is impossible for small institutions like that at Peking to take even a hundredth part of the students who are clamouring for Western education. But the mission schools have another and a newer difficulty, one which is causing the greatest heart-searching. This I must reserve for the next chapter.