Record of Teaching and Practice
Principles of Teaching Children · For Liu Bosong and Other Teachers
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191 · The Purpose of Teaching Children
The teachers of antiquity taught human relationships. In later ages, the habits of memorization, recitation, and literary composition arose, and the teaching of the former kings disappeared. In teaching children now, our sole concern should be filial devotion, fraternal respect, loyalty, trustworthiness, ritual propriety, rightness, integrity, and a sense of shame.
As for the methods of cultivating and nourishing them, we should draw them into singing poems to bring forth their intention and resolve, guide them in practicing rites to make their deportment dignified, and encourage them in reading and reciting books to open their awareness. People nowadays often regard singing poems and practicing rites as irrelevant to present affairs. These are all vulgar and shallow views of a declining age. How could they understand the ancients' intention in establishing teaching?
192 · Growth through Joyful Encouragement
Children's feelings generally delight in play and roaming and shrink from restraint and inspection. They are like plants first putting forth shoots. Give them room and ease, and their branches extend; crush and bend them, and they weaken and wither.
In teaching children now, we must make their inclination eager and encouraged and their hearts joyful. Then their progress will be unable to stop of itself. It is like timely rain and spring wind spreading over flowers and trees: everything stirs and unfolds, naturally growing by the day and changing by the month. But if ice and frost strip them bare, their living vitality becomes desolate and they wither more each day.
193 · What Poetry, Rites, and Reading Cultivate
Drawing children into singing poems not only brings forth their intention and resolve. It also releases their jumping, shouting, and cries through song, and expresses their hidden, suppressed, and knotted feelings through rhythm and melody.
Guiding them in practicing rites not only makes their deportment dignified. Turning, bowing, and yielding also set their blood and vessels in motion; bowing down, rising, bending, and stretching also strengthen and bring together their sinews and frame.
Encouraging them in reading and reciting books not only opens their awareness. Immersion and repeated consideration also preserve their minds; varied and expressive recitation also gives voice to their resolve.
All these methods guide intention and resolve along their proper course, bring nature and feelings into order, quietly dissolve meanness and reluctance, and silently transform rough obstinacy. Day by day they become steeped in ritual propriety and rightness without suffering from their difficulty, and enter center and harmony without knowing how. This is the subtle intention of the former kings in establishing teaching.
194 · The Harm of Treating Pupils as Prisoners
Those who teach young children in recent times spend every day merely pressing them on sentence divisions and assigned copying exercises. They demand restraint without knowing to guide through ritual propriety, and seek cleverness without knowing to nourish through goodness. They whip and bind them as if dealing with prisoners.
The children look on the schoolhouse as a prison and will not enter it, and on teachers and elders as bandits and enemies whom they do not wish to see. They watch for ways to evade and conceal things so as to carry on their play. They devise tricks and dress up falsehoods to indulge their obstinacy and baseness. Careless, shallow, common, and inferior, they move downward day by day. This is driving them toward evil while seeking to make them good. How could it succeed?
195 · Preserve the Guiding Rule of Teaching
The actual intention of everything I use in teaching lies here. I fear that prevailing custom will fail to understand and regard it as impractical. Moreover, I too am about to leave, and therefore especially repeat this admonition.
You who teach reading must make it your concern to embody my intention and keep it always as your instruction. Do not casually change or discard its guiding rule because of what fashionable opinion says. Then perhaps you may accomplish the work of “nurturing rectitude during youthful learning.” Think on it, think on it!
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