The men who are to do this work must be men most highly skilled in Western knowledge; they must understand science and be able to meet a follower of Haeckel in debate, they must be competent to discuss sociology with disciples of Herbert Spencer, and they must not be afraid to dip into the study of comparative religion; in addition, they must be qualified to write excellent Chinese and to be firm in their Christian faith. The production of such men as these should also satisfy the seventh and last aim of Christian education: it will associate learning with Christianity in the minds of the Chinese. The keynote of Chinese thought is its great admiration for learning. In China there is no caste or class, no division except between the ignorant and the learned; if Christianity is associated with ignorance, its influence will be lost, and it is no mean object to make Christianity and knowledge in the mind of the Chinaman two parts of one great idea.
It is obvious that as missionary societies lay weight on one or the other of these objects, they will support a different kind of school. If their object is the first, they will seek to educate the orphan and the waif, and the school and the orphanage will be, as they are in the Roman Catholic body, intimately joined together. If the object is to edify the Christian body and to provide it with a suitable pastor, the missionary body will erect primary schools for Christian children and theological and normal schools to complete their school system. If, on the other hand, the missionary body aims at leavening the whole thought of China, of capturing China for Christ, or if it aims at defending China against the terrible pest of Western materialism—which will turn the light that China now has into black darkness and harden her for ever against Christian teaching—the High School, College, and the University will be the objects on which the money will be spent. This last has been the object of the American bodies; and I think China owes a great debt of gratitude, under God, to the great width of thought and grasp of the situation that the American mind has exhibited.
CHAPTER XXII
GOVERNMENT EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
One of the highest testimonials to the wisdom of the missionaries in inaugurating an educational policy has been given by the Chinese Government. Imitation is the sincerest flattery, and missionary education has its imitator in no less a body than the Chinese Government. The Chinese have always loved education, but the education they admired was the literary education which had for its commencement the Chinese character and for its end the Chinese Classics; their system of teaching was different from our own; they were far greater believers in learning by rote than the most conservative English schoolmaster who ever set a long repetition lesson to his pupils. It is a strange sight to see an old-fashioned Chinese school, the boys all shouting out at the top of their voices the names of the characters whose meaning they do not understand. An essential part of the performance is the clamorous shouting; the louder they shout, the harder they are working and the quicker they think they learn, so when the visitor surprises a class their voices are not raised above a pleasant and reasonable elevation, but after he has been discovered by the class, the shouts increase in volume till the noise is only to be compared to the paroquets' cage in the Zoological Gardens.
Another peculiarity of the school is that all the pupils turn their backs to their master; the doctrine being that if they were allowed to watch their master, it would be perfectly impossible for him to detect their many little acts of dishonesty. The missionaries at first painfully imitated these schools; they felt that it was impossible to trust the children of their converts to the heathen atmosphere of a Chinese school, and at the same time they realised what great value and importance was placed by the Chinese on education. These schools led on to a sort of middle school called "shu-yuen," which existed in all big towns, which in its turn led on to four Universities, but they have been, I believe, for some time in an inefficient condition. Still for good or for evil the system was there, and long before our own new departure in education, the Chinese were quite accustomed to the idea that the boy who had sufficient ability might climb the ladder of learning, from class to class, from school to school, till at last he took the coveted Hanlin Degree. So high a value did the Chinese place on education, that it was possible, and it did indeed happen, that boys of the very humblest parentage climbed that ladder till they reached the most exalted positions.
The first sign of an alteration of this system was the book that was issued after the Chinese-Japanese war by Chang-Chih-Tung. That remarkable statesman realised after China's crushing defeat that a general reform was absolutely necessary if she was to maintain her place among the free and independent nations of the world, and he wrote a book entitled "China's Only Hope," in which he strongly advocated the acceptance in some measure of Western education. His scheme is the one which practically obtains now in China, that is of making Chinese learning the foundation on which Western education is to be placed. He had a great disbelief, like most Chinese, in the difficulty of acquiring Western education. He writes: "Comparative study of foreign geography, especially that of Russia, France, Germany, England, Japan, and America; a cursory survey of the size and distance, capital, principal ports, climate, defences, wealth, and power of these (the time required to complete this course ten days)." It is very hard for the Chinese literati to understand the difficulties of acquiring Western learning. Chang was a man of no mean intellect, and one of the reasons why he was so anxious to preserve Chinese learning was because he realised the destructive effect Western learning has on Oriental faiths. He hoped to preserve the ethics of Confucianism and to attach to them the practical knowledge of the West, which he realised was a necessity for China. He summed up the position by saying, "Western knowledge is practical, Chinese learning is moral."