China has been civilized from time immemorial, and at every period of her long history she has preserved her national characteristics. For more than three thousand years an absolute uniformity has characterized this immobile people. Everything is regulated by tradition. Education is mechanical and formal. The preoccupation of teachers is to cause their pupils to acquire a mechanical ability, a regular and sure routine. They care more for appearances, for a decorous manner of conduct, than for a searching and profound morality. Life is but a ceremonial, minutely determined and punctually followed. There is no liberty, no glow of spontaneity. Their art is characterized by conventional refinement and by a prettiness that seems mean; there is nothing of the grand and imposing. By their formalism, the Chinese educators are the Jesuits of the East.
16. Lâo-tsze and Khung-tsze.—Towards the sixth century B.C. two reformers appeared in China, Lâo-tsze and Khung-tsze. The first represents the spirit of emancipation, of progress, of the pursuit of the ideal, of protest against routine. He failed. The second, on the contrary, who became celebrated under the name of Confucius, and to whom tradition ascribes more than three thousand personal disciples, secured the triumph of his ideas of practical, utilitarian morality, founded upon the authority of the State and that of the family, as well as upon the interest of the individual.
A quotation from Lâo-tsze will prove that human thought, in the sixth century B.C., had reached a high mark in China:—
“Certain bad rulers would have us believe that the heart and the spirit of man should be left empty, but that instead his stomach should be filled; that his bones should be strengthened rather than the power of his will; that we should always desire to have the people remain in a state of ignorance, for then their demands would be few. It is difficult, they say, to govern a people that are too wise.
“These doctrines are directly opposed to what is due to humanity. Those in authority should come to the aid of the people by means of oral and written instruction; so far from oppressing them and treating them as slaves, they should do them good in every possible way.”
In other words, it is by enlightening the people, and by an honest devotion to their interests, that one becomes worthy to govern them.
If the Chinese have not fully profited by these wise and exalted counsels, it appears that at least they have attempted to make instruction general. Hue, a Chinese missionary, boldly declares that China is the country of all countries where primary instruction is most widely diffused. To the same effect, a German writer affirms that in China there is not a village so miserable, nor a hamlet so unpretending, as not to be provided with a school of some kind.[19] In a country of tradition, like China, we can infer what once existed from what exists to-day. But that instruction which is so widely diffused is wholly superficial and tends merely to an exterior culture. As Dittes says, the educational method of the Chinese consists, not in developing, but in communicating.[20]
17. Education among the Other Nations of the East.—Of all the oriental nations, Egypt is the one in which intellectual culture seems to have reached the highest point, but only among men of a privileged class. Here, as in India, the priestly class monopolized the learning of the day; it jealously guarded the depository of mysterious knowledge which it communicated only to the kings. The common people, divided into working classes, which were destined from father to son to the same social status, learned scarcely more than was necessary in order to practise their hereditary trades and to be initiated into the religious beliefs.