Problems of Chinese Education

Victor Purcell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138310124
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351388085
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The aim of this book, first published in 1936, was to give a complete conspectus of Chinese education at the time. It succeeds in this, describing entirely a period when China had abandoned an age-old system of literary education in favour of one derived from the West. However, the sponsors of the change, while admitting that the immediate new models were Western in origin, were able to point out that their prototypes were, in fact, in ancient China.

CHAPTER IV

THE LANGUAGE PROBLEM

Phrases such as the “modernization of China” reveal a lack of appreciation in the user of what is going on in that country: even uncompromising terms like “revolution” do not fairly describe the change. Revolution suggests a rearrangement, however complete, of integral parts of the same original entity, whilst what China is trying to do is to repair a system built up on “Rhythm”, “Wisdom”, “the Yin and the Yang”, and “Tao”, with elements of one based on “Ideas”, “Logic”, and “Philosophy”.

Much injury has been done to the understanding of China by the fabrication of analogies between her systems and our own. One of the unfortunate results of the sense of weakness and inferiority that oppresses the mind of Young China is the need that her apologists, native and foreign, seem to feel for discovering counterparts or anticipations in Chinese history of every phenomenon of the West. Much ingenuity has been expended in this connection with the effect of deceiving the Western reader and confusing the mind of the Chinese. Thus to deny “philosophy” to China is to alienate the nationalist, ever sensitive to new wrongs, and the impartial reader might be inclined to sympathize with him until he reflects that there is no special virtue in the word “philosophy” except as a description of the imaginative word-magic which has had such an influence on Europe both for good and bad. Philosophy has a definite linguistic basis, and because of the fundamental differences in the nature of languages can only be rightly used to include systems in the Indo-European tongues.¹ There is a mighty potency in symbols.

M. Marcel Granet in La Pensée Chinoise² seeks to isolate the fundamental concepts of Chinese civilization. In the governing dualism of the Yin and the Yang he can find nothing comparable to our abstract categories—number, time, space, cause, genus, species—these concrete, synthetic, effective notions which play with us the role of principles of organization and intelligibility³:—

“Chinese thought, common or even technical, never separates the consideration of Time from that of Space…. The Chinese scarcely concern themselves to conceive of Time and Space as two homogeneous media suitable for housing abstract conceptions. They have decomposed them conjointly into five great rubrics or rituals, which they make use of to divide the emblems distinguishing occasions and places. This conception has furnished them with frames of a kind of totalistic art. Relying on a knowledge which to us appears to be entirely scholastic, this art tends to realize, by the simple use of effective emblems, an ordering of the world which is inspired by the ordering of society. On the other hand, the Chinese have avoided seeing in Space and Time two independent concepts or two autonomous entities. They perceive in them a complex of rubrics or rituals identified as active wholes, as concrete groupings. Far from appearing incoherent, the interplay of these rubrics appears to them governed by a principle of order. This principle is inseparable from the feeling of the efficacy of rhythm. Manifest in the social organization, this efficacy did not appear to them to have less value when it was a question of organizing thought. One will see that the same idea of the universal efficacy of rhythm is to be found at the bottom of the Yin and the Yang.”

Whether or not M. Granet has lit on the primum mobile of Chinese thinking I am not competent to determine, but I do feel that in the passage above quoted he has indicated something of the fundamental differences between the Chinese civilization and our own. I feel, too, the truth of his observation in another part of the book that the rhythm of Chinese prose has the same functions which are fulfilled elsewhere by syntax and that the favourite rhythms of this prose are those derived from choral poetry. The logic which he denies to the literature has a linguistic basis. Bentham points this out in his theory of fictions.

“In short,” he concludes a passage on the subject, “it was by fancying that everything could be done by putting together a parcel of phrases, expressive of the various imports of certain words, mostly of certain general words, without any such trouble as applying experiment or observation to individual things, that, for little less than two thousand years, the followers of Aristotle kept art and science nearly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• I. THE OLD SYSTEM
• II. CONTACT WITH THE WEST
• III. THE AIM OF EDUCATION
• IV. THE LANGUAGE PROBLEM
• V. SAN MIN CHU I
• VI. THE PRESENT PERIOD
• APPENDIX
• INDEX