by Lao She
‘Actually, this was the best of all possible systems for Cat Country. You see, statistically we have the highest number of university graduates of any country on Mars. Of course, being first numerically makes us feel good, makes us downright proud. We Cat Country people are the most practical people on Mars. If you want to estimate the relative worth of things, the most practical way is to count. And when you start counting the number of university graduates – well, no one else can match us. It’s a fact. Everybody knows it’s a fact, and everybody smiles with satisfaction.
‘The emperor himself is very satisfied with the system. If he weren’t enthusiastic about education, how would we have so many university graduates? Thus, he has done well by his people and is pleased. The teachers also like the system, for under it everybody is a university professor; every school is the highest academic institution in the land; and every student is first in his class. Think of the honour and glory! Heads of families are pleased with the system too. Every seven-year-old brat is a university graduate, and the intelligence of the children is, of course, a credit to the parents. And the students? Well, they love it. If a child is lucky enough to be born in Cat Country and survive until the age of six or seven, he is sure to attain the status of university graduate.
‘From an economic point of view, the system is still more marvellous. You see, when schools were first established, the emperor himself had to pay the cost out of his own pocket; and yet the students who went through the system often had the nerve to oppose the emperor’s wishes and made trouble for him. As far as the emperor was concerned, this was nothing else but spending his own money to buy trouble. But under our new Graduate-the-First-Day system, the emperor is able to produce a huge number of graduates every year without spending a thing. Furthermore, the students produced by the new system are much more tractable and get along very well with His Majesty.
‘Of course, quite a few of our teachers do starve to death, but the number of university graduates goes on increasing anyway. In the beginning, the principals and teachers were paid, with the result that they were at each other’s throats from morning till night in such fierce competition for salaries that a few were killed every day. Sometimes they even incited the students to riot so that no one got any peace. Now that the emperor doesn’t give them any money, what is there for them to fight about? If they demand their pay, he simply ignores them; and if they press him too hard, he calls out the troops with clubs to play a tune on the tops of their heads. The students used to back them up in their demands, but now, since they all graduate on the first day anyway, even the students won’t help them. Since the teachers can’t look to any quarter for support, they have to content themselves with waiting around until they starve to death.
‘Thus, for the heads of households, the question of tuition for their children is solved in one fell swoop. All they have to do is send their brats to school on the first day and their educational responsibility ends there. And since the parents have to feed the children, whether they go to school or stay at home, why not let them go to school and pick up a degree and a little status? There are no expenses for books and writing materials anyway, for people don’t go to school in order to study in the first place. They go to pick up status, and they get it – on the very first day! What do you think of our system?’
‘Why do you still need principals and teachers?’ I asked.
‘To explain that, I’ll first have to say something about the evolution of the system over the past two centuries. You see, in the beginning, the schools offered a variety of curricula. Some of our students studied engineering, some studied commerce, and some studied agriculture – but what was there for them to do after they graduated? Those who had studied engineering picked up a bit of foreign technology, but since we have no industry, what use was it? Those who studied commerce learned something of foreign business methods, but here in Cat Country we only have street pedlars. Any large scale enterprise that opens up is immediately confiscated by the military. Those who studied agriculture learned foreign methods of farming, but since we don’t plant anything here but reverie leaves, what use was it?
‘Since under this kind of educational system, our schools were totally unrelated to the society around them, what could the students do after they graduated? There were only two alternatives: become an official or a teacher. Of course, to be an official you had to have connections. If you had an influential friend at court, then you could rocket to the top immediately, no matter what you had studied in college. But not everyone was lucky enough to have money and pull, and for those people the next best thing was to teach. After all, having received a modern education, they couldn’t very well lower themselves to become manual labourers or pedlars.
‘Thus the society was gradually divided into two kinds of people: university graduates and non-university graduates. The former were determined to go into teaching and officialdom; the latter became manual labourers and pedlars. For the time being I won’t take up the question of the influence of this situation on politics, but merely confine myself to its effects on education. It turned our educational system into a cyclical one: I study, I graduate, and then I teach your children. Your children study, graduate, and then teach my children. They constantly imbibe the same old line of learning, and consequently their characters deteriorate bit by bit every day. How can I best explain it? There were more and more graduates every day and, except for those who become officials, they all wanted teaching assignments. There just weren’t enough schools to go around and the results, of course, were ludicrous.
‘The only purpose of this cyclical system of education was to pass on a reading knowledge of a few immortal textbooks; it had nothing to do with the cultivation of personal integrity. Sometimes in competing for a chair, one or two years of civil war would be stirred up with so much slaughter and bloodshed that one might really have thought that people were laying down their lives to elevate our cultural level when as a matter of fact the whole thing was only over salary.
‘Gradually the emperor, politicians and militarists all began cutting into the operating expenses of our educational institutions. Then the educators began throwing all of their underlying energies into organising movements to demand back salary. Teaching stopped altogether and the students, having discovered what their teachers were really like, got into the habit of skipping classes. It was at this point that there began the Graduate-the-First-Day Movement that I just told you about. And that movement, of course, slit the jugular vein of the entire system – operating expenses. The emperor, the politicians, the militarists and the heads of households all wholeheartedly approved of the Graduate-the-First-Day Movement because of the money that it saved.
‘Everyone considered education to be useless anyway and nobody respected the hacks who were its purveyors; thus everyone was more than content to make the saving. And yet no one dared to close the schools down completely for fear of foreign ridicule. And so, the doors of the schools remained open as before and the number of university graduates even increased, but no money was spent. Since the doors were open to everyone, “cyclical education” became “universal education”, in other words, no education at all. But the schools were open for business as usual. Thus it was that our educational system became the biggest joke that Mars had ever cracked.
‘When this movement had reached full maturity, it did not reduce in the slightest degree our principals’ and teachers’ enthusiasm for education. They still fought with each other over positions tooth and nail. You’re wondering why.
‘Well, you see, in the beginning the schools really did look like proper schools: they had desks, chairs, and equipment of every kind. When the system was still supported by a yearly budget, principals and instructors used to make money by selling school property. Then the principals began fighting for the principalships of the larger schools with the highest annual appropriations, and the result was widespread bloodshed. No matter how you look at it, you must admit the empero
r handled this situation in a most humane fashion: he simply discontinued the annual appropriations for the schools. Having done this, he was far too embarrassed to be so strict as to go on and forbid the sale of school property. Well, the competition over principalships came to an end, and then, one by one, the schools turned themselves into wholesale bargain-lands. Everything that could possibly be moved was sold. Thus it is that now every school is nothing more than an empty piece of ground surrounded by four walls.
‘You’re probably still wondering why it is that people continue to want to be principals and teachers. Well, in the first place they don’t have anything else to do anyway. Furthermore, every other consideration aside, the rank of teacher or principal is still useful; the road to advancement under our cyclical system of education is from student to teacher, and from teacher to principal. While it’s true that principals and teachers have no hope of obtaining any salary, they can use the school system as a ladder to officialdom. And so it is that, while there is no education in our schools, there are students, teachers and principals. Moreover, every single school is the “highest academic institution”. And when a student hears that his school is the highest academic institution, he’s so bowled over that he’s not apt to worry about anything else. Since there’s no education to be had in the schools, what do people who really want to study do? They revive the old system and hire family tutors. Of course, only the wealthier families can afford this. The vast majority of children still had to go to the public schools to come by their ignorance.
‘The utter failure of this system of education has resulted in the obliteration of Cat Country’s last shadow of hope. The very first period during which the new educational system was tried was contemporaneous with the corruption of the “new learning” which the new system was supposed to introduce. The new system had to be transported to us from abroad simultaneously with the new learning. If one calls learning “new”, then that is a clear indication that learning is always advancing and developing, gathering new truths to itself every minute of every day. But as soon as the new system and the new learning arrived here, they both grew white hair as quickly as a vegetable moulds during rainy weather.
‘You see, trying to adopt another country’s institutions and learning wholesale is about as naïve as trying to graft another man’s flesh onto your own without first preparing your own body to receive the transplant; you can slap a new piece of flesh on your own arm, but unless you’ve made some provision for nourishing it, it’s idle to expect it to grow. Similarly, when you grab hold of a whole pile of new knowledge, yet lack the inquiring spirit needed to nurture it, the inevitable result is cyclical education. You learn “A” and teach “A”, but never add to it. And thus it was that we corrupted the new learning.
‘During the initial period of borrowing, our people entertained an idle hope. Although they became aware of the folly of thinking that a piece of new flesh cut from another man’s body would assure one of eternal life, they still clung to another superstition. For somehow or other, they always felt that as soon as new knowledge arrived – no matter how little – they would immediately become as vigorous and prosperous as the foreigners. In retrospect, I think that we can forgive them this arrogant pipe dream, for at least they still hoped to do something with the new learning. But today people are aware of schools only as places where people compete for principalships, where instructors are beaten, and where student movements occur. They take all of these things and lump them together with the new learning, and then stand around and curse the whole witches’ brew. By now they think that the new learning is not only incapable of strengthening the state, but is also enough to destroy the people. And so we have now advanced from corrupting the new learning to damning it outright. The heads of some families dismiss all the new learning and hire tutors to teach their children the traditional stone classics. Consequently the cost of our old stone books has gone up ten times, much to the satisfaction of my grandfather, who sees this as the victory of our national heritage over foreign learning.
‘My father was very pleased too. He immediately sent his sons abroad to study, for he felt that now they would be the only ones capable of understanding everything on the basis of foreign learning. He expected that when they came back home they’d really be able to fleece our native ignoramuses brought up on the stone classics. However, he has never felt that the new learning should be widespread, but rather that it is enough for a few people to pick up enough of the foreigners’ tricks to make us strong. But in fact, most people are closer to grandfather’s position than they are to father’s. Like him, they see the new learning as a combination of magic and witchcraft capable only of confusing the mind and blurring the vision so that sons begin to beat their fathers, girls begin to curse their mothers, and students begin killing their teachers; in sum, they see it as utterly useless. But somehow or other, I have always felt that the more we vilify the new learning, the closer we are to the end of Cat Country.
‘You will ask the reasons for the collapse of the new education. That’s something that I don’t know myself, but I have a feeling that it’s due to a certain lack of integrity. Think about it for a minute. When the new educational system first arrived, why was it that people wanted it in the first place? It wasn’t that they hoped that students would broaden their understanding, but rather that they thought they could use it to get rich. Nor was it out of any desire to let people understand new truths; it was rather out of the wish that we’d be able to make new and better consumer goods. In other words, they wanted all that education could provide, except the most important part – that concerned with inculcating integrity and stimulating a love of learning. By the time the new schools were established, there were many bodies physically present in the schools, but few men of integrity. The principals were there to make money; the faculty was there to make money; and the students were there preparing themselves to make money.
‘People looked upon the schools as they would a new-style restaurant, but no one paid any attention to the question of what the food was like. Of course, the schools also had the problem of being in a weak state built upon a decadent society led by an emperor and politicians without integrity, hoodwinking a populace that was even more lacking in integrity. Of course, it’s true that in an impoverished state like ours there are quite a few people whose personal integrity has been worn away by hunger and poverty. I won’t deny that, but I will deny that it provides adequate grounds on which to defend the individuals in charge of our educational system. Why did we promote education in the first place? To save the nation. And how were we to save it? Through the promotion of learning and the perfection of individual character. Our educators ought to be held responsible for not acting in such a way as to achieve those twin goals, and for not being willing to sacrifice a bit of personal advantage in fulfilling the functions of principals and teachers.
‘Perhaps I expect too much from the teaching profession. People are people, and a teacher fears hunger just as much as a prostitute does. Hence, one might object that it’s not fair to put so much of the blame on the teachers. I don’t like laying it all on their shoulders either; but when you think of it, there are some women who will not lower themselves to become prostitutes even when they are dying of hunger. Shouldn’t teachers also have enough backbone to grit their teeth and show an equal amount of integrity?
‘One might argue that since the government delights in taking advantage of honest men, it would be foolish for teachers to be too upright, for the more upright they were, the more the government would take advantage of them. But no matter how bad the government may be, one would think that the educators might at least have considered using the weight of public opinion as a counterbalance to the government. For if our educators had integrity themselves, then they could turn out students with a sense of personal integrity; and it is unlikely that the society at large would be so insensitive as to be unaware of the high quality of students produced. And if the people at la
rge saw our educators as wise and loving fathers, and if the students that those educators produced were able to achieve things in society, then it would be doubtful that the government could afford to treat education lightly or could go on refusing to provide funds for it. I think that ten years of an educational system that turned out students of integrity would change the entire face of Cat Country. However, our new system of education has already been in operation for two centuries and you have seen the results.
‘If even our old system of education was able to foster honesty, a love of parents and an obedience to rules, how is it that the new and improved system has failed to make a comparable showing? Everybody says – especially the educators themselves – that it is because of the dark evils of society. But whose responsibility is it to get rid of those evils? The educators only know how to blame social conditions, but have entirely forgotten that their responsibility lies precisely in making society a better place to live in. To be sure, society is black, but they have forgotten that their own personal integrity should serve as a bright star in the night sky. And since they have forgotten even that, what hope is there? I know that I am too extreme and perhaps somewhat idealistic, but shouldn’t our educators also have at least some modicum of idealism? I also realise that neither the government nor society gives our educators sufficient support. But who can expect anyone to want to help a group that is itself as evil as the society or the government?
