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INTRODUCTION

This paper does not attempt to prove anything.

It is merely

English and ·

2 statement based on opinion expressed by friends -

Chinese, also on discussions held with my 4th year Education

students, and finally on visits to two or three cities in China.

I have been guided by the aphorism of Confucius, viz. The Superior

man is Catholic and not Partisan; The Ordinary man is Partisan and

not Catholic.

THE FEW CURRICULUM IN CHINA AND THE OLD STUDIES

==

By: L. Forster, M.A., Professor of Education, University of Hong Kong.

The violence of a revolution, says Macaulay, is directly

proportionate to the degree of oppression which preceded it.

Its object of course is to get rid of a tyranny, and so there

must be a breach with the past and of necessity an intense hatred

for those elements which are believed to have been the cause of

the troubled backward state. Now the culprit in China was not

apparently a despotic tyrannical ruler who enslaved the people

deprived and ***x*x* them of their wealth but a classical system which

enslaved the intellect and limited the scope of learning. It

is that which is arraigned by young China not for what it did,

but chiefly for what it omitted to do. It sacrificed scientific

research for politico-ethical culture, and at the same time

excluded the majority of the nation, from participating in the

delights of knowledge.

It would seem that the difficulty of the Chinese classical

language was the chicf factor in conserving and maintaining the

old social and political order, before the revolution.

Mastery of it, as the key to the knowledge necessary for

taking part in the government required such a long period of

study and such a power of concentration and memory, that it was

quite impossible for the average individual to arrive at this

position.

P.T.0.

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