Young China's Experiments in Education and Swarâj.

Young China's Experiments in Education and Swarâj. The easiest, and to some minds the strongest, criticism that may be hurled against Young China is that it has presumed to found a Min Kuo i.e. government "by the people" before the people have learnt to read and write. For, today "no education, no republic" is a truism of human thought. In the twentieth century in every civilized and independent country education is free as the air. It is naturally inconceivable that there can be a republic in a society which does not enjoy universal education.

1. Swarâj before Education.

And yet all the republics that we know of had been instituted long before the idea of "compulsory" education, or "free elementary education", or "public school" system was conceived. The sociopolitical reforms and revolutions which have enlarged mankind's visions and powers were effected by communities the general masses of which were as low in intellectual status as are the lower strata of the Chinese society today.

Arthur Young, the English economist, in the report of his travels in France during 1787-89, "takes note of every object that meets his eye" but never mentions a village school. "Had such schools existed we may be sure that he would have visited them. . . . The education of the people was a dead letter in France at the time he wrote. Here and there the cure or freres Ignorantius would get the children together and teach them to recite the catechism or spell a credo and paternoster. Writing, arithmetic, much less the teaching of French were deemed unnecessary. The Convention during its short regime (1792-96) decreed a comprehensive scheme of primary instruction, lay, gratuitous and obligatory, but the initiative was not followed up, and the first law on the subject carried into effect was that of 1833. How slowly matters advanced in Brittany may be gathered from an isolated fact. Even so late as 1872 two thirds of the inhabitants of the Ile and Vilaine could neither read nor write. It remained for the Third Republic to remove this stigma"!¹

It is clear that at the time of the Revolution the people of France were not "fit" for self-government, democracy, responsibilities for popular sovereignty and so forth. In 1833 Guizot, as minister of public instruction, ordered an inquiry into the educational condition of France. The Exhibit of Primary Instruction in France was published in 1837. "All the teachers", as we read in it, "did not know how to write. . . . The ignorance was general. . . . The teacher practised all the trades; he was day labourer, shoemaker, inn-keeper. He had his wife supply his place while he went hunting in the fields."²

Take, again, the history of education in England. "The passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, which greatly extended the franchise in England, awakened a new sense of peril from the ignorance of the masses, and in the following year the first parliamentary grant was made for elementary education."³

The actual educational condition of the English people in 1870 was described by Forster in the speech presenting his celebrated Education Bill. He said that the state-aided system was educating at the time "more or less imperfectly" 1,500,000 children. Many of these were mere infants; of the children between six and ten years of age it was estimated that 700,000 were in the aided schools, against 1,000,000 who were "neglected"; of those between ten and twelve, 250,000 were in the schools and 500,000 were not accounted.⁴

The American republic also had been founded at least half a century before law recognized education as the birth right of human beings.

"The War of the Revolution had left the three millions of people impoverished; and difficulties with Great Britain, which continued up to the close of the war of 1812, made them uncertain even of the future. . . . During all this time schools . . . were running down. . . . It is true that colleges were springing up, and that academies were in the most prosperous condition, but neither of these institutions was for the people. Most of the latter (good schools) were within the private rather than the public system, and touched but a comparatively small proportion of the people. . . . There was absolutely no such thing as the pedagogical supervision of the schools, and not a public institution for the training of teachers in the country."⁵

Such were the educational conditions in the most advanced areas in 1837 when Massachusetts first organized the State Board of Education. This is fifty one years after the Declaration of Independence; and of course it was long before the level of literacy and elementary education could become uniform throughout the country.

None of these peoples waited to have their countries dotted over with schools and colleges before overhauling the political fabric. If they had thus waited they would have only committed the mistake of Plato as tutor to Dionysius II, king of Syracuse in Sicily (B. C. 367-357). It is well known how in Plato's ideal republic, as in the states devised by the ancient Chinese and Hindu political philosophers, the king as well as the ruling officers must have to be philosophers. When, therefore, he got a chance to carry out his ideal, Plato proceeded to build up his royal pupil according to his educational creed, "No philosopher, no king." Now, the basis of all philosophical investigations is science, and geometry, is the most fundamental of all sciences. Hence, argued Plato, in order to be a king or a "guardian", one must begin with geometry. Accordingly he set Dionysius and his court to mastering the properties of triangles and squares. It is not strange that the scholars were soon disgusted with this "thorough" pedagogy, and the whole experiment failed.

The maxim, "No education, no republic" or "no shikshâ, no swarâj" may similarly be pushed to this ridiculous length. Statesmen should rather recognize that the very institution of the republic is itself a powerful educative agency, and that actual participation in the work of government is an integral schooling for democracy.

2. China's Educational Endeavours.

It must not be imagined, however, that republican China is depending exclusively or mainly on this "education through political activity" in order to make its citizens fit for the responsibilities of modern democracy. But like the revolutionists in France the Chinese republicans have drawn up a systematic scheme of educational institutions, primary, secondary, and collegiate. The goal, as everywhere else, is compulsory and universal literacy. Educational reform is really considered by Young China to be the very pivot around which all other reforms turn.

The traditional Confucian pedagogy aimed at tao teh, i.e. cultivation of moral or virtuous character. The republicans have applied the right of interpretation to this ideal of Confucius in order to adapt it to the modern needs. In 1912 Tsai Yuan Pei, the first minister of education under the new regime, defined the aim of education to be to "instill into the minds of the people the right knowledge of liberty, equality, and fraternity.⁶

Educational activity is indeed the most prominent feature of Chinese life today. For a short time, during the revolutionary period (1911-12), the modern educational programme first instituted in 1905 was disorganized. But "thanks to the enthusiasm with which educational affairs were taken up under the new regime, the ground lost during the revolution was quickly recovered."⁷

The following schedule indicates the work done by the Chinese republic in public education during the four years from 1912 to 1915. The figures for 1909-10 are given to show the point at which the revolution found the new Chinese education since its promulgation in 1905.

Those who are aware of the financial difficulties of China will call this progress marvellous. In five years the schools have increased more than 50 per cent, the student body more than 75 per cent, and the teaching staff about 40 per cent. In 1919 the number of schools rose to 134,000, and of students to 4,500,000 in round figures.

Undoubtedly the figure 4,500,000 is but a drop in the ocean of China's population. It is certainly not yet time to calculate the percentage of literacy among the Chinese or compare it with that of Japan or of the Eur-American powers. In 1919, in every 400 men and women in China only 5 persons could read and write.

But the fact calls for notice that in about a decade and a half Young China may be said to have almost caught up to the educational activity in India, which has been under the control of a European nation, in parts, for over a century. In this the most advertized example of the alleged successful administration of the "white man's burden", the number of boys and girls at school in 1918-19 was only 7,936,577, out of a total population of 242,988,947. This was but a fifth of the children who have the right to free education in modern independent states.

People who are enthusiastic about the achievements of occidental governments in the Orient should therefore take a warning from the role of England in India and hesitate to think of China being added to the list of their "burdens".

A few years ago newspapers were almost curios in China. At the end of 1917 there were at least 10,000 dailies, weeklies, or monthlies conducted by the Chinese. Practically the whole of this journalism is the product of the revolution and republican life. The daily vernacular papers in Peking were sixty in number, some of which had the circulation of 20,000 copies.

A noteworthy institution in the education department of the new administration is the "Bureau of social education". It has been playing a very useful part in promoting the general culture of the people, in a manner similar to that of the Public Lectures System maintained by American cities. A number of quasi-educational institutions has come into existence under its auspices. They diffuse education among the public by lectures, moving pictures, etc.

Besides clubs (literary, political, scientific, and pedagogic) have been becoming conspicuous items in the social life of Young China. All along the line there is a regular effort to raise the intellectual level of the citizens.

Among such "popular" institutions we note in 1919 the existence of 10 museums, 462 libraries, 197 travelling libraries, 2129 lecture halls, 1242 schools for poorer children, 37 open air schools, and 4593 ordinary schools. The figures speak for the social service and patriotic activities of China's leaders.

3. Embryology of Democracy.

But we must have to remember that, anthropologically and historically,⁸ a republic is indeed an abstraction. Ordinary men and women, however, understand but the concrete signs of sovereignty, the tangible symbols of power, the material embodiments of law, and the living fountains of justice. Nay, it is the very visible human elements in the government, the personal prejudices and equations in the administration that appeal to the imagination of mankind. Monarchy with its divine halo and time-honoured paraphernalia is thus almost a "natural" institution, not only in "primitive" but also in "advanced" societies.

But under special circumstances the mentality of man may be modified and human nature "re-made" through deliberate experiments and the force of "creative" will. Thus on a thoroughly virgin soil a community of kingless men and women may purposely settle down to constitute a state of its own. It would not be pressed heavy by the weight of its past except what it may care to select from the accumulated experience of ages. as positively conducive to its interests. It would have absolute choice regarding the number, character, and qualifications of its population, the size and area of its settlements and cities, the tenure of agricultural holdings etc. Granted these conditions, a republic can be easily manufactured, if desirable (and, indeed, if it does not evolve spontaneously), according to some paper-constitution or "written laws" consciously resolved upon through the clubbing of fertile brains. The states of the New Hemisphere are instances of such republics "made to order" on a more or less cut and dried plan.

But the Old World is not a political or socio-economic tabula rasa. It has its fixed grooves, sanctified prejudices, historic vested interests, absolute landmarks, and permanent turn-pikes. Here, therefore, up till now there has been only republic of long standing; and this, again, among a people which has never had any king, and which succeeded in repelling all invasions by foreign kings. This is Switzerland. As for other countries where the very atmosphere is surcharged with the tradition of kings, queens, princes, and palaces, human energy has been rather barren in its results so far as the construction of pure republics is concerned. England could not stand a kingless polity; and the republic in France, formed in spite of her own sentiments, has throughout had a precarious career.

The testimony of history about the embryology and development of republics should however be interpreted as being open to two limitations.

First, a republic, wheresoever or howsoever born, may transform itself into one or other of the well-known forms of government, as it has often done, e.g., in England under Cromwell's army rule, in France and in Latin America.

In the second place, forms of government have been modified by free will in the past and would be more and more matters of choice in the future. The explanation is to be sought in the expansion of creative intelligence and in the daily increasing power of man over the world-forces.

4. "Absolute" Revolutions.

Since 1870 education has become universal all through the civilized world except only in dependencies, protectorates, and spheres of influence. The universalization of education among the masses is soon going to be a fact everywhere on earth. As a result of this the revolutions of the twentieth century and after would have their raison d'être more specifically in abstract considerations of social justice, viz. the removal of obstacles to the growth of nationhood, international equity, the equalization of opportunities for the progress of the races, the highest development of men and women, in one word, the dignity of man as a human being, than in any violation, real or false, of original compacts, oaths, promises or treaties, and inhuman tyranny, bigotry, license, inquisition, "pogrom" etc. on the part of the powers that be.

The liberators of man in the twentieth century will not. wait to count the barbarities inflicted on defenceless men and women by kings, capitalists, or landlords. The revolutionists of the future will not need a Schiller's Wilhelm Tell to electrify and spiritualize them against the tyrants, or "Satans" as they are called by Gandhi in India (1921). With the advance of rationalism the world will bring forth revolutions on absolute grounds; and even republics, abstract as they are, may become part of the very nature of mankind. Men and women will act more as the "moral agents" of Immanuel Kant and not as the mere creatures of environments and historic circumstances. The will is becoming more and more self-legislative and free; and revolutions will be welcomed as Nishkâma Karma (duty for its own sake) or "categorical imperatives" by the leaders of the human race. The ideal of swarâj as sovereignty and democracy will grow into a commonplace phenomenon in the normal psychology of individuals.

The first fruit of political thought and action under such milieus of creative intelligence cannot fail to be the emancipation of mankind from history. Politics will be regulated not so much by what tradition determines as by the conception of the ideally best form of government, whatever it may be considered to be for the time being.

Already the Russians have out-Frenched the French in their enunciation of the rights of man. Their program gives us a glimpse into the ideals and tendencies of political futurism. "The government very soon granted amnesty for political offenders, March 22, restored the constitution of Finland, March 21; promised Poland self-government and unity; conferred equal political, economic, educational, and military rights upon the Jews, March 26; abolished the death penalty, March 31; substituted the elected heads of the provincial zemstvos in places of the former appointed provincial governors; and fixed prices at rates twenty to fifty percent lower than those current. ... On June 9 elections for municipal and district councils were held, with universal suffrage for the first time in Russian history, and on June 22 universal (male and female) suffrage was extended to the zemstvo elections. Confiscatory taxes were laid on excessive war profits, and heavy burdens (sixty per cent) imposed on large incomes. ... The trade unions, moreover, were permitted to exact from employers large wage increases and other concessions; in Petrograd 140 factories were placed on a six-hour-day basis, June 6."⁹

It cannot be maintained that all these measures, not to speak of the Bolshevik cataclysms since November 1917, are the necessary and logical reactions to the tyranny and persecutions of the Romanoff regime as such. Nor is the "economic interpretation of history" adequate to explain this phenomenal revolution. The philosophical historian must see in a great part of it the presence of the "absolute", the "ideal", the "spiritual", which forms a most powerful ingredient in all Zeitgeists.

The republican movement in China is such an absolute movement. It is a complete breach with the past tradition in exactly the same sense and to the same extent as was the French event of 1792. Its real import can, therefore, be understood not from the platform of the history that was, but pragmatically, i.e., with reference to the result that is to be. It is an event in the liberalization of mankind, a process in the advancement of world culture. Here is an instance where political science has to admit the claims more of the visions of the idealists and the theories of the dreamers than of the over-wise conservatism of the hide-bound diplomats who fear every change in the status quo as a possible step in the destruction of their cherished preserves.

Nor, in fairness, can students of comparative history condemn the revolutions and counter-revolutions among the Chinese as evidences of political puerilism. The experience of America during the war of independence should be significant to the critics. The tribulations of the Americans are thus described by Guizot in his essay on Washington:

"Washington himself was not in safety; a conspiracy was formed to deliver him up to the English, and some members of his own guard were found to be engaged in it. ...

"Arrests and banishments became frequent. The prisons were filled. Confiscations of property commenced. Local committees of public safety disposed of the liberty of their fellow citizens on the evidence of general notoriety. Popular violence in more than one instance was added to the arbitrary severities of the magistrates. . . . Notwithstanding the legitimate character of the cause, notwithstanding the virtuous wisdom of its leaders, the infant republic was experiencing the horrors of a civil war. . . .

"The colonies wanted confidence in each other. All of them were jealous of the power of the Congress, the new and untried rival of the local assemblies; they were still more jealous of the army."

If scientific judgment is to prevail, China's experiments in social reconstruction should have the same justification as those of the now successful America and France. In the meantime let Eur-American statesmen and sociologists swallow the ugly facts that in 1921 Constantine has been restored to kingship in Greece, the cradle of Western democracy, that Karl the Habsburg has failed to get back the crown in Hungary only through a diplomatic bungling, that the Deutsch-National Party in the Imperial Republic of Germany is looking for the return of the Hohenzollerns, and that L'Action Française of Paris still enlightens the French royalists with the messages of coming golden age from their beloved ex-roi Philippe.

Notes

1. Young's Travels in France with introduction by Miss Bethan-Edwards.↩
2. Compayré: History of Pedagogy, Payne's translation↩
3. Monroe: Cyclopedia of Education↩
4. Ibid.↩
5. Dexter: History of Education in the United States↩
6. Kuo: The Chinese System of Public Education.↩
7. The China Year Book, 1916.↩
8. Vide "The Tenacity of Monarchy in the West" and "Republicanism in France" in Sarkar's Political Institutions.↩
9. The Political Science Quarterly, September, 1917.↩