§ 185. The Family, as the organic starting-point of all education, makes the beginning. The nation looks upon itself as a family. Among all unorganized people education is family-education, though they are not conscious of its necessity. Identical in principle with these people, but distinguished from them in its consciousness of it, the Chinese nation, in their laws, regulations, and customs, have constituted the family the absolute basis of their life and the only principle of their education.
§ 186. The natural element of the family is found in marriage and relationship; the spiritual, in love. We may call the nature of family feeling which is the immediate unity of both elements, by the name of Piety. In so far as this appears not merely as a substantial feeling but at the same time as law, there arises from it the subordination of the abstract obedience of the woman as wife to the husband, of children to the parents, of the younger children to the elder. In this obedience man first renounces his self-will and his natural roughness; he learns to master his passions, and to conduct himself with deferential gentleness.
—When the principle ruling the family is transferred to political relations, there arises the tyranny of the Chinese state, which cannot be fully treated here. We find everywhere in it an analogical relation to that of parents and children. In China the ruler is the father and mother of the country; the civil officers are representatives of a paternal authority, &c. It follows that in school the children will be ranked according to their age. The authority of parents over children is according to the principle entirely unconditional, but in actuality very mild. The abandonment of daughters by the poorest classes in the great cities is not objected to, for the government rears the children in orphan asylums, where they are cared for by nurses appointed by the state.—
§ 187. The distinction of these relations which are conditioned by nature takes on the external shape of a definite ceremonial, the learning of which is a chief element of education. In conformity with the naturalness of the whole principle all crimes against it are punished by whipping, which does not necessarily entail dishonor. In order to lead man to the mastery of himself and to obedience to those who are naturally set over him, education develops an endless number of fragmentary maxims to keep attention ever watchful over himself, and his behavior always fenced in by a code of prescriptions.
—We find in such moral sentences the substance of what is called, in China, Philosophy.—
§ 188. The theoretical education includes Heading, Writing—i.e. painting the letters with a brush—Arithmetic, and the making of verses. But the ability to do these things is not looked at as means of culture but as ends in themselves, and to fit one therefore for the undertaking of state offices. The Chinese possess formally all the means for literary culture—printing, libraries, schools, and academies; but the worth of these is not great. Their value has been often over-rated because of their external resemblance to those found among us.
§ 189. The members of the Family are certainly immediately distinguished among each other as to sex and age, but this difference is entirely immaterial as far as the nature of their employment goes. In China, therefore, every man can attain any position; he who is of humblest birth in the great state-family can climb to the highest honor. But the progress of spirit now becomes so mediated that the division of labor shall be made the principle on which a new distinction shall arise in the family: each one shall perfect himself only in that labor which was allotted to him as his own through his birth into a particular family. This fatalism (caste-distinction) breaks up the life, but increases its tension, for spirit works on the one hand towards the deepening of its distinctions; on the other, towards leading them back into the unity which the natural determining directly opposes.
§ 190. The chief work of education thus consists in teaching each one the rights and duties of his caste so that he shall act only exactly within their limits, and not pollute himself by passing beyond them. As the family-state concerns itself with fortifying the natural distinction by a far-reaching and vigorous ceremonial, so the caste-state must do the same with the distinction of class. A painful etiquette becomes more and more endless in its requisitions the higher the caste, in order to make the isolation more sharply defined and more perceptible.