Little Readers of the Classics

The Huayu Foundation has held seven classics courses for children. Every time the kids come to class, they must first put on dark blue robes and bow in front of a statue of the great sage Confucius. Then, while sitting cross-legged at low tables, the class recites fluently in loud and clear voices from the works of the Song dynasty Confucian scholar Zhang Zai, "I set myself to understand the ways of Heaven and Earth, and to bring peace and stability to the people. For continuing the legacy of the old sages I am determined in my studies. I will work to create peace among the myriad worlds."

For an hour and a half, the teacher leads the students reading. He rarely pauses and explains virtually nothing. After reading from Confucius'Analects, they change to Laozi and then to Tang dynasty poetry. Sometimes they split into different groups for boys and girls, and sometimes they form two lines to play word games. The relatively short phrases the students recite can be memorized after repeating only a few times. With the children's shrill voices reverberating in the classroom, it's enough to make you think you've gone back in time and are sitting in some traditional Chinese village school.

Confucius editing the classics and teaching his students from a Ming edition of the Analects. Confucian theories have formed the mainstream of Chinese thought. （courtesy of the National Central Library）

Province-wide

Similar kinds of classics courses for kids have been springing up all across Taiwan and the Pescadores over the last two or three years. Estimates put their current number at over 200.

Mothers have created their own little schools by cleaning up an empty room and inviting over neighbors' kids to recite with their own. Some classes are offered along with music and art lessons or as part of after-school day-care programs. Some teachers in regular schools promote the reading of the classics. In schools in such places as the Pescadores, the principal might even lead the entire student body in reciting. There are libraries, neighborhood activity centers and Buddhist and Taoist temples that offer free classes. The Chuangwei Rural Township Library in Ilan County, for instance, has put on classes for young children and plans to offer a class for teachers at day-care centers and kindergartens, so that all of the township's children will read the classics in the mornings. Adherents of the I-Kuan Tao religion are preparing to set up classes at spots all over the province.

Even if the classes vary greatly in size, they share similar ideals and methods. Most don't charge tuition. There are no newfangled reading materials used in class, and no lively songs to stir things up, just the traditional method of reading passages aloud. There's no central management, of course, but because everybody is reading from the same sources, it's like a chain-store business.

When you mention reciting the classics, what often floats to mind are images of youths bobbing their heads as they read in the movie Liang Shan-po and Chu Ying-tai.（courtesy of The National Film Archive）

Experimenting twice

The person who sparked this activity is Professor Wang Tsai-kuei of National Taichung Teachers College. Formerly editor-in-chief of the philosophical journal Goose Lake Monthly, Wang was a student of the classics master Mou Tsung-san.

"The classics are eternal books that develop basic human morality," Wang says. "They're also like water that flows directly from the source of a culture. In China they have always been represented by the Four Books [the Great Learning, the Analects, the Doctrine of the Mean, and Mencius] and the Five Classics [the Book of Odes, the I Ching or Book of Changes, the Book of Rites, the Book of History, and the Spring and Autumn Annals]. Today we can always expand the list if we want and add other works of the highest value." For these children's courses, Wang has compiled three volumes with large print and Mandarin phonetic symbols: a combination Analects, Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean; selections from Laozi and Zhuangzi, and a collection of 300 Tang dynasty poems.

In fact, Wang started experimenting with teaching children to read the classics about 20 years ago. At that time he was working at Fengchia Elementary School in Taichung, and he found that many of his students were like he had been as a youngster bored with the "watch Spot run" readers. And so he filled time left over from lessons by teaching the children to read the classics. He did this for a year but had to stop when a new principal arrived.

Wang started experimenting again ten years ago, on his own four children. Deciding against the double role of parent and teacher, he asked a graduate student at Taiwan Normal University to come to his home and teach his kids there. The calligrapher Tu Chung-kao, a good friend, sent over his two daughters to join the class. It was like a little traditional Chinese village school.

Wang believes in taking advantage of young children's strong memories and giving them direct contact with the Chinese sages' wisdom. The children needn't understand what they read, and the teacher needn't worry about capturing their interest. Just getting them to recite was enough.

The results proved that the children, who just relied on the beautiful rhythms of classical Chinese to recite from memory-instead of going the modern way of understanding first and then remembering--didn't show any less interest. To the contrary, after a time they showed increased sensitivity to characters and appreciation of what they were reading.

Shifting to reverse

There is no disputing that children have good memories. And don't many parents have their toddlers read The Three Character Classic or Tang dynasty poems, which are also written in classical Chinese? Some people do their best to make the classics more lively, such as by putting Confucius or Laozi into comic strips or by making audio-visual teaching materials with The Three Character Classic and Tang poetry.

But asking children to memorize Confucius or Laozi seems to be another matter altogether. Many parents can't help but wonder how kids can accept reading these Chinese classics when even adults find them hard to understand. If they are to be read and memorized but not explained, wouldn't this go against the principles of enlightened education? Wouldn't this be turning back the clock?

This school term, Hsinchu chief executive Fan Chen-tsung has made learning of the Three Character Classic a focus of education in elementary schools and junior highs. The move has elicited widely divergent opinions. Those opposed to it cite such luminaries as Hu Shih and Chiang Meng-lin, who recalled having to recite the classics as among the "most horrible experiences" of their childhoods. These critics worry about remaking past mistakes and giving children unhappy childhoods. One academic leader who is a natural scientist opposes these courses because he holds that society should be democratic, scientific and international. He believes that reading the classics is out of step with the times.

In the early years of the ROC educators held the same views and removed the classics from Chinese education during the May Fourth Movement.

Many parents are worried about social disorder, and as soon as they hear about courses teaching children to read the classics, they enroll their kids, hoping their characters will be shaped by the wisdom of the ancient sages.

Chinese vs. Western Education

Reading from the classics as a child was a Chinese educational tradition practiced for thousands of years. These classics included such books as The Thousand Character Classic, The Three Character Classic, the Five Books and the Four Classics and other beginners' texts.

Generally speaking, students in ancient China would enter an elementary school or a privately supported village school at the age of five or six. As Mencius said, "Set up schools to teach." Scenes in the film Liang Shan-po and Chu Ying-tai of students bobbing their heads as they recite the classics are firmly fixed in people's memories. For thousands of years, the Chinese had passed along their cultural legacy in this way.

But then, scorned by early-20th-century intellectuals, the sounds of children reciting classics became a thing of the past.

In the late Qing dynasty, modern education began in China. In 1905 China abandoned its civil service exam system, which was thousands of years old. At the beginning of the republican era, Tsai Yuan-pei, then Minister of Education, ordered "all recitation of the classics in elementary schools to cease." Then he ended the reading of the classics in courses for future elementary and junior high school teachers, and this educational tradition was finally put to a halt. In 1919, Hu Shih and others promoted a "new culture," calling for the vernacular to be used in writing, as well as advocating total Westernization in education.

Intellectuals of the day, in the face of the West's bullying and humiliation of China, advocated a complete turn to Western ideas in order to save the nation from subjugation and ensure its survival. They regarded the Chinese classics as the source of China's backwardness, and in haste threw away much of their cultural inheritance.

Wang Tsai-kuei has forcefully promoted having children recite the classics. Having them read the classics when their memories are strongest isn't "force-feeding," he argues.

Knowledge vs. philosophy of life

The classics were attacked as part of the old civil service exams, but the exams, which were graded irrespective of social rank and made it possible for men of common background to serve the nation, were bad only for having set questions and standards for grading. Particularly near the end, people were selected based on how they wrote "the eight-legged essay," which imposed great restrictions on form and wiped out originality of thought. But does the name "classics" itself signify feudal and conservative society?

"The truth is that we can reflect on this: What are the Five Books and Four Classics teaching us? Searching for their ultimate meaning isn't in fact the main purpose for reading them. Rather, the purpose ought to be to improve human character," says Wang Chen-hua, director of the Techien private school.

Wang Tsai-kuei stresses that by promoting the classics he is neither denying Western rational science nor opposing democracy or modernization. Rather he is just drawing from the classics to supplement where the schools are weak. "Currently our educational system puts the understanding of knowledge' as the standard, but the 'philosophy of life' and 'life values' that the Chinese have always stressed, which quietly shape a person's character, are lost as a result."

In modern society, where people have lost their bearings, the problems of youths are mounting. These cannot but make people reflect that total Westernization and modernization are not a cure-all, and that cultural transplantation is not something just skin deep. Moreover, Western society itself has numerous drawbacks. In recent years, there has been growing enthusiasm for creating traditional-style private schools that are aimed at adults who want to read the classics. These encourage people to take another look at the wisdom of our Chinese ancestors. Educating the children in the classics can perhaps be regarded as one wave in this tide of reflection. And because its target is the next generation of society, the activity has created even more resonance.

In a traditional-style class, the students first bow to a statue of Confucius.

Cultivating Confucian eyes

Three years ago Wang Tsai-kuei started promoting to society his idea of reading the Chinese classics. After getting grants from the Ministry of Education and the Chinese Culture Foundation, he formally opened courses for children. In January of 1994, with the additional support of the Academic Research Foundation of Asian Culture and the Hua Shan Forum (a private educational institute within the Society for the Study of Religious Philosophy), he established the Classics-Reading Promotion Center. Invited everywhere to lecture, he also established a free teacher-training course. Reaction was enthusiastic.

Chen Yu-min, assistant executive director of the Huayu Foundation, explained the future direction of developing classics reciting courses: "Little kids all want to be good people. So why do they change when they enter junior high? Modern society is one big dyeing vat. You should raise children from a young age to develop calmness and integrity by reconnecting them with a culture thousands of years old."

Many parents worry about the mounting problems of youth, and once they hear that someone is teaching a course in classical Chinese, they rush to enroll their children, hoping that the kids will come in contact with what made their ancestors great and that this will shape their characters to be different from the stereotypical "new youth."

"Only if it takes root at a young age will it be of use. If you wait until junior high and high school before you start talking to them about these moral principles, they won't want to listen,' says a Mrs. Tseng.

Every Saturday Tseng drives her kids from Neihu to a classics reciting class on Roosevelt Road in Taipei, and in two years they've rarely missed a class.

The Hua Shan Forum of Chungho has a group of mothers that read along with the kids. Their motive for participating was rooted in the fear that their children would become "bananas"-yellow on the outside and white on the inside. Their children, who call each other "comrades in books." have been reciting the classics for more than two years now, and they have already memorized the Analects. After the mothers blew the dust off their copies of the classics and started to accompany their kids reciting, they found that the more they read, the more they got interested.

Some parents consider the practical benefits of reading the classics. "Children have excellent memories. If they're not memorizing the classics, they'll be memorizing the words to commercials or pop songs," one argues. "Isn't it better that they read the classics,so they can raise their language abilities and refine their characters at the same time?"

Another parent, a betel nut chewer who rushes about every day to make ends meet, gives a different reason for letting his kids take such classes: "They won't be worse for having read the Four Books and Five Classics. So why not let them go and 'cultivate Confucian eyes'?"

Today and yesterday juxtaposed: Texts used by children to recite the classics, next to Chinese textbooks from the Japanese era.

Finishing the classics before 15

Even if they don't deny the value of the classics, many parents still have doubts about classics courses, believing that the children already have too much homework pressure. They ask if there is any direct correlation between reading the classics and advancing in one's studies. Aren't such classes just increasing students' work loads? Wouldn't they get more out of studying computers or English?

For a while now, Li Wen-ling, an elementary school teacher, has led her entire class in reading the classics during activity period. Because this wasn't common in schools when she started, she had to play the hard and lonely role of pioneer. In addition to a few parents who looked askance on the activity, her students would ask why they had to recite when other kids didn't and would use the classical Chinese they had learned in class to attack her in their essay books. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Yet in the face of these many obstacles, she is insistent, "I am a music teacher, and I know how exposure to things in youth can subtly shape character. If you can encourage your children to listen to classical music from a young age, why can't they recite classical Chinese?"

Wang Tsai-kuei has similar feelings: "Understanding is extremely important for education in the sciences. But what about in the humanities? What counts as true understanding? Does it mean what you can write on an exam? Or is it some sort of deep and inexpressible feeling in the heart?"

In the past children would recite classics that they didn't understand, which seems a far cry from modern enlightened education. The ancients, however, said, "Read the classics a hundred times and the meaning comes naturally." This is a principle that has long been in practice. The late Ming Confucian scholar Lu Shi-yi once said, "Anyone who can remember can understand." Before the age of 15, because young minds have yet to be tainted and much knowledge is yet to be acquired, "there's more memory and less understanding." After 15 or 16, the opposite is the case. And so, "If you want to learn the classics by heart, do it before you turn 15."

To take a modern metaphor, it's like using a computer. If you put more in its memory, when you need to use it later, it will easily be recalled.

"Children's memorization abilities are strongest from six to 13," says Wang Tsai-kuei. "If they memorize the classics at this time, they'll be doing what they do best. Compare it to filling the four stomachs of a cow. Once its stomachs are filled. it can slowly ruminate on what it ate." On the contrary, today's modern school curricula, which make children learn advanced math before it's appropriate to their cognitive development, is more like "force feeding."

Strike the bell! It's time for classics class.

Like drinking water

Though some adults may wonder if having their kids recite the classics isn't also "force-feeding," they cannot but show surprise at their kids' ability to remember them.

Fifth-grader Hsieh Chung-kang recalled in a school essay that when he first heard his teacher say that they were going to memorize the classics, "I felt very uneasy, and almost blacked out.... Tang poems were a lot like tongue-twisters, and the sentences in Laozi simultaneously explained and baffled, which created a sense of deep mystery. The classical Chinese in the Analects was pretty confusing." But the callow rookie has become an old pro, and now he feels that reciting the classics is easy, just like drinking water. "I may memorize some passages poorly, but think of it like Confucius wandering from state to state. Didn't he sometimes hit a bit of rough going?"

Little kids in kindergarten or the earliest grades, who can only recognize a few characters, can still read along with their older siblings quite well, and in fact possess even better memorization abilities. Bai Juyi's poetry, for instance, is easy to understand ("even women and children get it" as an old Chinese expression goes), and so long poems of his such as "Everlasting Regret" and "Song of the Pipa Player" flow easily from their lips, and they recite with great zest.

True, memorizing without concern for understanding does sometimes leave a feeling of insufficiency, and teachers deal with this problem in their own ways, as best fits their talents.

In a music and art class in Hsintien, teacher Liu Kuei-kuang, whose regular job is teaching Chinese in high school, believes that older children have started developing their comprehension abilities, so he thinks that a teacher may, if he deems it suitable, explain some of the passages for them. Take, for instance, the passage in the Analects when Zaiyu asks Confucius if one year, instead of three, would be enough for mourning, and Confucius says nothing but makes his disapproval clear. Liu tells his students that in one's actions one can't hold the attitude espoused by a soft drink commercial: "If I want to, there' s nothing I can't do." He also makes use of the popular cartoon "Slam Dunk Champions" to point out that a ballplayer can't just do what he wants but rather must coordinate with the team. The children showed great enthusiasm for class.

Kung Wei-chin, director of the Yisheng Classics School, points out that reciting from the classics was all children used to do. Today, with so many distractions from the outside world, he believes that appropriate explanations can strengthen children's powers of reasoning and allow the classics to resonate in their lives. Otherwise, the kids may simply forget them, or the content will not have shaped their characters even if the words come easily to their lips.

But this involves the problem of teachers. How many adults today understand the classics? Hence, many people suggest instead of giving the children rigid explanations, it's better just to lead them reading aloud, allowing them to store the classics away in their memories and await the right time to make sense of them.

How much wisdom about Heaven and Earth are packed in these volumes?

The ways of Heaven and Earth

"The fact is that children already understand the ways of Heaven and Earth," says Wang Chen-hua, who reached this conclusion teaching a cultural class for children several years ago. Theirs is a kind of silent understanding, an understanding about life that they themselves may be unconscious of having.

Many parents also observe that though it may seem as if children are blindly memorizing, they are in fact half understanding. One kid went to a "folk culture village," saw a carriage wheel, and quoted, "The thirty spokes of a wheel are useless without the spaces between them." Another kid who was quarreling with his little sister, stopped suddenly, apologized and said, "The softest thing on Earth can harness the hardest." And teachers have been given a startle to look in students' practice notebooks and find such famous classical passages as: "Study without thought is useless. Thought without studying is lazy." Or "A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step." Of course, sometimes the children will quote out of context, and the results will make adults laugh. For example, a family went to eat pizza, and the schooled-in-classics little brother said, "What's not cut straight shouldn't be eaten."

Although people say that one can't demand immediate results and that an appreciation of the classics requires a lifetime to mature, you can see some concrete changes in two or three years. Consider these "extra benefits."

Wang Tsai-kuei's son Wang Hsuan-li is a senior in high school and started reciting the classics when he was in the third grade. Along the way he has read the Four Classics, Laozi, the Book of History, the I Ching, the essay collection Guwen Guanzhi, the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government and others. Meanwhile, he went from being ranked thirty-something in his third-grade class to being among the top few students. Then he skipped a year, and entered high school a year early. This can not be said to be unrelated to his having studied Chinese. "Reading the classics has improved my memory and made it much easier to concentrate while studying."

In university he wants to major in philosophy and "study conceptions of life and the universe." His future goals are "to help people and society." "The classics are absolutely correct," says this younger Wang, whose powers of reflection are great. "You've got to be friendly and tolerant of others. Only when you've got it right yourself can you go make requests of others. For me to know these principles but not try to practice them would be wrong." Smiling, he adds, "I think the kids learning the classics now hold more hope than me."

Hundreds of thousands

Most of the classics courses today take place outside of regular school, but very few parents have the time to read with their children. Wouldn't it be better-save time and energy-to recite the classics in school?

This is Wang Tsai-kuei's ideal. Reading the classics started in society outside of the educational system. Now it has entered a stage of being half-way in the system, as supplementary education or an extracurricular activity. Eventually, it may enter the system, with classes in elementary schools or with the reading of the classics included in Chinese class. It's just that after it enters the system, can it avoid becoming overly rigid itself as a topic for exams? If it does, how much of the original meaning of reciting the classics will be preserved? These are all problems worth noting.

Wang's goal is to get 100,000 students to read the classics by the end of 1996. Now he has already got 15,000 participating, and he predicts that by the end of the year the number will reach 10,000. His wife, Hsu Tuan, has organized squads of volunteers at the Hua Shan Forum's Classics Promotion Center to go to neighborhood centers and religious groups to promote the idea of reciting the classics. The members themselves have started reading them. "Otherwise how can we convince others?" And some enthusiastic teachers have compiled rosters of teachers, putting names from all over the province on the same list, so that those putting on classes can support each other and not have to struggle alone.

Having promoted the classics for several years, Wang has encountered many setbacks, but these haven't discouraged him. According to his own statistics, "About 30 percent of the kids love to recite the classics, 30 percent hate the activity, and 40 percent could take it or leave it. But because I started from scratch, gaining anyone is making progress." There are 2 million grade school kids in Taiwan. If 100,000 were reading the classics, the activity would be a force to be reckoned with. When it reaches that number, he will turn his focus to getting adults to read the classics so as to cultivate teachers. In this way, when the kids get older, there will be people to explain the classics to them.

Many hope that efforts can be expanded to include mainland China and Chinese communities overseas. The mainland has passed through the calamities of the Cultural Revolution and the suppression of the "Four Olds" (old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits), and there is even more need for the classics to put down roots again. But political factors make breakthroughs there difficult. Still, in recent years, as Taiwan residents have visited family in the mainland, established business interests there, or made donations through ancestral place associations, hundreds of guidebooks for reciting the classics have been brought over to the mainland. These have even drawn the notice of the authorities there. As for overseas Chinese, efforts can be directed through the Overseas Affairs Commission and religious organizations with branches abroad, or can be promoted through the local Chinese schools. The Hua Shan Forum claims that classics courses have been started in overseas communities in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

"What's the purpose of reading the saints and sages? Only to learn how to be a human being." Perhaps this movement is about returning culture to its original place.

[Picture Caption]

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In recent years classics courses in which students read directly from Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, etc., have been held all over Taiwan. Such classes form one wave of a movement to revive ancient culture.

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Confucius editing the classics and teaching his students from a Ming edition of the Analects. Confucian theories have formed the mainstream of Chinese thought. (courtesy of the National Central Library)

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When you mention reciting the classics, what often floats to mind are images of youths bobbing their heads as they read in the movie Liang Shan-po and Chu Ying-tai.(courtesy of The National Film Archive)

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Many parents are worried about social disorder, and as soon as they hear about courses teaching children to read the classics, they enroll their kids, hoping their characters will be shaped by the wisdom of the ancient sages.

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Wang Tsai-kuei has forcefully promoted having children recite the classics. Having them read the classics when their memories are strongest isn't "force-feeding," he argues.

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In a traditional-style class, the students first bow to a statue of Confucius.

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Today and yesterday juxtaposed: Texts used by children to recite the classics, next to Chinese textbooks from the Japanese era.

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Strike the bell! It's time for classics class.

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How much wisdom about Heaven and Earth are packed in these volumes?

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In the Pescadores, the classics have already entered the schools' regular curricula. In Chuwan Elementary School, for instance, the principal le ads the entire student body reciting in the early morning before clean-up.

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Taipei's Tzehui Tang School sponsored Taiwan's first children's classics reading competition in August. With many kids participating and parents offering encouragement by their sides, it made for a high-spirited scene!