class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 27]"/>highly esteemed, and may hold the highest offices in the country.

In 1905 an edict was promulgated abolishing the old system of examinations. This marks an epoch in Chinese educational history and will tend to place China in the line of modern political and industrial development.

Criticism of Chinese Education.—1. It is not under government control.

2. It has no interest beyond the boundaries of China, and regards no literature save the Chinese classics.

3. It is non-progressive, having made practically no improvement for many centuries.

4. It cultivates memory to the neglect of the other powers of the mind, and places more emphasis on the acquirement of knowledge than on the development of the human faculties.

5. It obtains its results through fear, not by awakening interest in or love for study.

6. Women are not embraced in the scheme of education.

7. It produces a conservative, untruthful, cunning, and non-progressive people.

8. It reaches practically all of the male sex, and there is opportunity for all to rise to the highest positions of honor, but its methods are so unnatural as to awaken little desire for education on the part of the young.

9. Its motive is debasing to the character.

CONFUCIUS (B.C. 550-478)

The name of Confucius is the one most revered among the Chinese. To him and his disciples are due not only the native religion, now supplanted by Buddhism, but also the language and literature. He began to teach in a private school at the age of twenty-two. He rejected no pupil of ability and ambition, but accepted none without these qualities. He said, "When I have presented one corner of a subject, and the pupil cannot make out the other three, I do not repeat the lesson." The following are extracts from the analects of Confucius:—

1. What you do not like when done to yourself, do not to others.

2. Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

3. To see what is right and not do it is want of courage.

4. Worship as if the Deity were present.

5. Three friendships are advantageous: friendship with the upright, friendship with the sincere, and friendship with the man of observation. Three are injurious: friendship with a man of spurious airs, friendship with the insinuatingly soft, and friendship with the glib-tongued.

6. Shall I tell you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to confess your ignorance.

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