Read vertically from right to left, these beginner’s characters spelled out an encouraging verse :
PREPARING FOR THE EXAMINATIONS
COMPETITION FOR A CHANCE to take the civil service examinations began, if we may be allowed to exaggerate only a little, even before birth. On the back of many a woman’s copper mirror the five-character formula “Five Sons Pass the Examinations” expressed her heart’s desire to bear five successful sons. Girls, since they could not take the examinations and become officials but merely ran up dowry expenses, were no asset to a family; a man who had no sons was considered to be childless. People said that thieves warned each other not to enter a household with five or more girls because there would be nothing to steal in it. The luckless parents of girls hoped to make up for such misfortune in the generation of their grandchildren by sending their daughters into marriage equipped with those auspicious mirrors.
Prenatal care began as soon as a woman was knokvn to be pregnant. She had to be very careful then, because her conduct was thought to have an influence on the unborn child, and everything she did had to be right. She had to sit erect, with her seat and pillows arranged in exactly the proper way, to sleep without carelessly pillowing her head on an arm, to abstain from strange foods, and so on. She had to be careful to avoid unpleasant colors, and she spent her leisure listening to poetry and the classics being read aloud. These preparations were thought to lead to the birth of an unusually gifted boy.
If, indeed, a boy was born the whole family rejoiced, but if a girl arrived everyone was dejected. On the third day after her birth it was the custom to place a girl on the floor beneath her bed, and to make her grasp a tile and a pebble so that even then she would begin to form a lifelong habit of submission and an acquaintance tvith hardship. In contrast, in early times when a boy was born arrows were shot from an exorcising bow in the four directions of the compass and straight up and down. In later times, when literary accomplishments had become more important than the martial arts, this practice was replaced by the custom of scattering coins for servants and others to pick up as gifts. Frequently the words “First-place Graduate” were cast on those coins, to signify the highest dream of the family and indeed of the entire clan.
It was thought best for a boy to start upon his studies as early as possible. From the very beginning he was instructed almost entirely in the classics, since mathematics could be left to merchants, while science and technology tvere relegated to the working class. A potential grand official must study the Four Books, the Five Classics, and other Confucian works, and, further, he must know how to compose poems and write essays. For the most part, questions in civil service examinations did not go beyond these areas of competence.
When he was just a little more than three years old, a boy’s education began at home, under the supervision of his mother or some other suitable person. Even at this early stage the child’s home environment exerted a great effect upon his development. In cultivated families, where books were stacked high against the walls, the baby sitter taught the boy his first characters while playing. As far as possible these were characters written with only a few strokes.
These twenty-five characters were taught first :
Read vertically from right to left, these beginner’s characters spelled out an encouraging verse :
Let us present our work to father.Confucius himself Seventy were capable gentlemen.
You young scholars, Work well to attain virtue,taught three thousand. eight or nine !
and you will understand propriety.
First a character was written in outline with red ink on a single sheet of paper. Then the boy was made to fill it in with black ink. Finally he himself had to write each character. At this stage there was no special need for him to know the meanings of the characters.
After he had learned in this way to hold the brush and to write a number of characters, he usually started on the Primer of One Thousand Characters. This is a poem that begins:
Heaven is dark, earth is yellow,
The universe vast and boundless . . .
It consists of a total of two hundred and fifty lines, and since no character is repeated, it provided the student with a foundation of a thousand basic ideograms.
Upon completing the Primer, a very bright boy, who could memorize one thing after another without difficulty, would go on to a history text called Meng Ch’iu (The Beginner’s Search) and then proceed to the Four Books and the Five Classics normally studied in school. If rumors of such a prodigy reached the capital, a special “youth examination” was held, but often such a precocious boy merely served as a plaything for adults and did not accomplish much in later life. Youth examinations were popular during the Sung dynasty, but declined and finally were eliminated when people realized how much harm they did to the boys.
Formal education began at about seven years of age (or eight, counting in Chinese style). Boys from families that could afford the expense were sent to a temple, village, communal, or private school staffed by former officials who had lost their positions, or by old scholars who had repeatedly failed the examinations as the years slipped by. Sons of rich men and powerful officials often were taught at home by a family tutor in an elegant small room located in a detached building, which stood in a courtyard planted with trees and shrubs, in order to create an atmosphere conducive to study.
A class usually consisted of eight or nine students. Instruction centered on the Four Books, beginning with the Analects, and the process of learning was almost entirely a matter ofsheer memorization. With their books open before them, the students would parrot the teacher, phrase by phrase, as he read out the text. Inattentive students, or those who amused themselves by playing with toys hidden in their sleeves, would be scolded by the teacher or hit on the palms and thighs lvith his fan-shaped “warning ruler.” The high regard for discipline was reflected in the saying, “If education is not strict, it shows that the teacher is lazy.”
Students who had learned hoiv to read a passage would return to their seats and review what they had just been taught. After reciting it a hundred times, fifty times while looking at the book and fifty with the book face down, even the least gifted would have memorized it. At first the boys were given tbventy to thirty characters a day, but as they became more experienced they memorized one, two, or several hundred each day. In order not to force a student beyond his capacity, a boy who could memorize four hundred characters would be assigned no more than two hundred. Otherwise he might become
so distressed as to end by detesting his studies.
Along with the literary curriculum, the boys were taught proper conduct, such as when to use honorific terms, how to bow to supe-riors and to equals, and so forth-although from a modern point of view their training in deportment may seem somewhat defective, as is suggested by the incident concerning a high-ranking Chinese diplomat in the late Ch’ing dynasty who startled Westerners by blowing his nose with his fingers at a public ceremony.
It was usual for a boy to enter school at the age of eight and to complete the general clasical education at fifteen. The heart of the curriculum was the classics. If we count the number of characters in the classics that the boys w-ere required to learn by heart, we get the following figures :
Analects ................................... 11,705
Confucius ..................................34,685
Book of Changes ...................... 24,107
Book of Documents ...................25,700
Book of Poetry .......................... 39,234
Book of Rites ............................ 99,010
Tso Chuan ............................... 196,845
The total number of characters a student had to learn, then, was 431,286.
The Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean, which together with the Analects and the Menciiu constitute the Four Books, are not counted separately, since they are included in the Book of Rites. And, of course, those were not 431,286 dzferent characters: most of the ideographs would have been used many times in the several texts. Even so, the task of having to memorize textual material amounting to more than 400,000 cliaracters is enough to make one reel. They required exactly six years of memorizing, at the rate of two hundred characters a day.
After the students had memorized a book, they read commentaries, which often were several times the length of the original text, and practiced answering questions involving passages selected as examination topics. On top of all this, other classical, historical, and literary works had to be scanned, and some literary works had to be examined carefully, since the students were required to write poems and essays modeled upon them. Anyone not very vigorous mentally might wcll become sick of it all halfway through the course.
Moreover, the boys were at an age when the urge to play ir strongest, and they suffered bitterly when thcy were confined all day in a classroom as though under detention. Parents and teachers, therefore, supported a lad, urging him on to “become a great man!” From ancient times, many poems were composed on the theme, “If you study while young, you will get ahead.” The Sung emperor Chentsung wrote such a one:
To enrich your family, no need to buy good land :
Books hold a thousand measures of grain.
For an easy life, no need to build a mansion:
In books are found houses of gold.
Going out, be not vexed at absence of followers :
In books, carriages and horses form a crowd.
Marrying, be not vexed by lack of a good go-between:
In books there are girls with faces of jade.
A boy who wants to become a somebody
Devotes himself to the classics, faces the window, and reads.
In later times this poem was criticized because it tempted students with the promise of beautiful women and riches, but that was the very reason it was effective.
Nonetheless, in all times and places students find shortcuts to learning. Despite repeated official and private injunctions to study the Four Books and Five Classics honestly, rapid-study methods were devised with the sole purpose of preparing candidates for the examinations. Because not very many places in the classics were suitable as subjects for examination questions, similar passages and problems were often repeated. Aware of this, publishers compiled collections of examination answers, and a candidate who, relying on these compilations, guessed successfully during the course of his own examination could obtain a good rating without having worked very hard. But if he guessed wrong he faced unmitigated disaster because, unprepared, he would have submitted so bad a paper that the officials could only shake their heads and fail him. Reports from perturbed officials caused the government to issue frequent prohibitions of the publication of such collections of model answers, but since it was a profitable business with a steady demand, ways of issuing them surreptitiously were arranged, and time and again the prohibitions rapidly became mere empty formalities.