Education in the Far East

Front matter

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"AS

CHARLES -ETHWING

Prefatory Note

This book is not a description. It seeks to be an interpretation : an interpretation of forces, tendencies, and movements, in parts of the world which are destined to fill an enlarging place in men's thoughts. The relation of education to these conditions is the most important of all relations. I, therefore, shall be glad if the reader is able to think of the book as at once human, and a bit, though I hope not too much, educational.

C. F. T.

Cleveland, 1st May, 1909.

Contents

I. The Problem of the East and the Fab

East 3

JAPAN II. The Japanese Mind 61

II

The Japanese mind is a mind plus a heart. It is less pure intellect than most minds, it is more emotional. It is less philosophic but more practical than the German ; it is more facile but less profound in its workings than the English; it is less practical but more philosophic than the American mind. Its processes are rapid and superficial. The results of its operations are best interpreted in terms of sentiment. Of the two comprehensive types of mind, the logical and imaginative, it clearly belongs to the imaginative. It thinks in pictures, in individual images rather than in prolonged and closely related reasonings. It prefers concrete to abstract language. Its power of illustration, of individualizing, is superior to its power of generalizing.

The Japanese mind, as I have intimated, is not a mind inclined to prolonged logical reasonings. It is changeable. The people have been called inconstant, unstable, fickle. The mind I would not call fickle, but it prefers much variety of subject for its reflections to a single closely compacted topic of thought. It seems to lack greatness, as the stature of the race lacks size. It is agile, alert. Its agility and alertness arise from what may be called its lightness: the swallow turns where the eagle cannot. It moves rapidly, and having the defects of its excellences, it does not move profoundly. A professor of one of the great universities, having been for many years a teacher in Japan, has said to me, "No Japanese ever really thinks." The remark may be too extreme, but it is significant. Yet it is a mind of the type which the metaphysicians call subjective; it turns in upon itself; it is concerned with its own operations. It is not a scientific mind. It observes the phenomena of nature far less than it studies its own constitution. But these studies are of the heart as well as of the intellect. The mind feels for itself ; it sentimentalizes about itself.

Because of this union of the heart and of the intellect in itself, the mind is a receptive one. All the avenues of its approach are wide open. It desires to take in much, and much it does take in. Facts, truths, ideas are its food, and for such food it is constantly ravenous. The lectures which the students of the universities and of the higher schools attend every week are many, many even to excess, amounting in most cases to twenty-five, thirty, and even more. Such intellectual extravagance arises from the earnestness of the men themselves. They are eager to know; they have not usually come to discriminate between knowledge and power, — between the mind as an intellectual granary and the mind as an intellectual engine. They have not learned that education is really educative, — a drawing out, and not a filling in. They need to learn that receptiveness is by no means reflectiveness, and that memorizing is not necessarily thinking.

The Japanese mind is also a mind which likes rules, formulas, precedents. It approves of systems ; and its operations easily become systematic. Before a new, a unique crisis, it is in peril of standing blind and deaf and dumb. It fails to appreciate unknown conditions, and it is liable to have no hand to guide or to lift and no will to inspire. When the rulers of the people came to know that the nation had fallen behind advancing nations of the West in the progress of civilization, it turned for light and for strength not to itself, as did Germany at the close of the Napoleonic era, but to America and to Europe. The method was as wise as it was inevitable. The navy is English, the army German and French, the educational system German and American. The mind lacks initiative, independence. It is imitative. The universities brought in foreign professors ; and as one by one they returned to their homes in America, England, Germany, their places were filled by native-born teachers ; the students had learned their lessons, and were able, becoming teachers themselves, to follow out the precedents set and the methods prescribed.

The Japanese mind has not had the advantage of receiving what the Anglo-Saxon mind has had for four hundred years, the " Greek bath," as Hegel terms it. In its place it has had the Chinese bath. It has substituted Confucius for Plato and Aristotle. It has taken a series of ideographs instead of the most perfect and scientific language which the world has yet made. In learning this language, in studying this literature, — replete as it is with wise maxims, and interpretative as I know it to be of many of the moods of the human soul, — it has found special exercise for the memory. It has not thus received a training in discrimination, in appreciation. That general enlargement of the mind, that enrichment of the intellect, that cultivation of the whole man, which Greek has given for hundreds of years and to the leaders of the progressive peoples, the Japanese mind has lacked and lacks still.

The Japanese mind is, also, at once moral and unmoral. It has a fondness, both intellectual and emotional, for moral abstract truth, but it also has not inspired the people to moral practice. The Japanese mind likes a discussion, even more indeed than the American, — and that is much, — and it especially likes a discussion about ethical sanctions, definitions, discriminations. No subject is so constantly taught in all the schools as ethics. Yet the application of ethics to life seems remote. The two great fields for the application of ethical precepts seem peculiarly needy in Japan, — business and the family. That the commercial morality of the nation is improving, that sexual morality is becoming more pure, does not prevent one from saying that dishonesty and trickery are woefully common, and that the family relation commands, on the whole, small respect. The foreign tradesman is obliged to inspect his purchase, whether it be a yard or a bale, with care. The defect may be deftly hidden ; and when discovered and brought to the notice of the seller, it awakens surprise and apology ; a surprise and apology which are apparently conventional.

An illustration of the doubt which the Japanese themselves have of the honesty of their countrymen has just been told me. An American author, of great distinction, freely gave to an educational association the manuscript of a course of lectures which he had delivered to Japanese teachers, for the purpose of publication. This association was unwilling to entrust the publication to any Japanese publisher, for fear that he would not make for copyright purposes a correct statement of the number of copies sold.

Likewise in the family. The importance of the family to society, and to the whole social order, does not prevent about one half of all the domestic unions of the common people from being not legalized by due process and form, and also does not prevent about one third of all marriages, formal or informal, from resulting in divorce or separation. Ethics has not yet been so impressed upon the people as to prevent or to stop most serious domestic and social evils. Ethics has been deficient in impressing the great formal and social duty of chastity. Sexual purity is a lesson of which the teaching should be made more impressive, and of which the learning should be made more constant and thorough.

The Japanese mind, therefore, is a mind moral, in its theoretical interpretation of ethical truth, and unmoral in the application of this truth. The nation is really an unmoral nation as compared to the noblest ethical standards of the Christian nations of the West.

The Japanese mind, like the nation, is still in the evolutionary process. It needs, what it will receive, growth. The whole intellectual level of the people is not as high as that of the peoples of the West. The intellectual power of the greatest men of Japan is nearer the height of the intellectual attainments of the greatest men of the West than is the intellectual level of the Japanese people near the intellectual level of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. But, as the colored boy said to Howard at Atlanta, "We are rising." The struggle of nature for thousands of years has been to make brain. That struggle is most vigorous in Japan ; it needs to be. That struggle will go on ; and in the decades and the centuries, it will bring forth, under good conditions, great popular forces both static and dynamic.

Ill

SIMILARITIES AND CONTRASTS OF JAPANESE AND AMERICAN EDUCATION

Aside from the common and essential elements which belong alike to all systems of education, one element is found in both the American and Japanese system : it is the fundamental element of profound respect for education on the part of both nations. In both countries education has come to be regarded as the most important part of the national life. In 1872 a proclamation made by the new Emperor declared : " All knowledge, from that necessary for daily life to that higher knowledge necessary to prepare officers, farmers, mechanics, artisans, physicians, etc., for their respective vocations, is acquired by learning. It is designed henceforth that education shall be so diffused that there may not be a village with an ignorant family, nor a family with an ignorant member." In the year of 1890, the

Emperor also issued what is now known as, " The Imperial Kescript on Education." It is so named, although it might also be called a rescript concerning the ethical virtues ; but the spirit of education is the atmosphere which breathes through each sentence. For in "virtue," declares his Majesty, "lies the source of our Education," as well as "the glory of the fundamental character of our Empire." His Majesty also commands that "our subjects" are to "pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers." These two imperial writings have been and still continue to be an inspiring force in the progress of education. The Emperor, by his personal and royal example in attending the commencement exercises at the University of Tokyo and of other schools, and by inviting teachers in the public schools to his palace on special occasions, has proved his great and abiding interest in this form of, and this force for } civilization. These proclamations are akin to the immortal utterances of Washington regarding the importance o£ education in a republic.

It should also be said that this interest of both nations comes to its head in the members of the teaching profession themselves.

Teachers in both Japan and the United States are deeply absorbed in their work. The members of no profession devote so much attention to their professional improvement. The teachers of Japan know that they — like their nation — are new, and they show in many ways the desire to profit from the results secured by peoples of larger and richer experience. These teachers are both men and women. In America more than four fifths of all the teachers in the public schools are women; in Japan more than four fifths are men. The proportion of women teaching in Japan increases, as it does in some American states. In the year 1900-01, of 91,798 Japanese public school-teachers, only 11,910 were women; but in 1904-05, from 101,272 teachers, almost 20,000 — 19,790— were women. The two countries are concerned with opposite sides of the same problem: in America the number of men teaching in the schools should be increased and the number of women diminished ; in Japan the number of women should be increased and the number of men diminished.

A contrast which strikes one in the public education, — to proceed from the outer to the inner part, and from the " lower education " to the " higher," is the character of the schoolhouses themselves. Many of these houses, like most Japanese buildings, are built of wood. Laf cadio Hearn writes of Japanese architecture as being characterized by " impermanence." The Japanese schoolhouse is a frail structure ; its timbers small, its walls, of boards or clapboards, thin, its floors weak. The construction seems loose. From first floor to the shingled roof of the second story, a general air of instability pervades. In the whole building is found no intimation of that strength which belongs to the brick or stone schoolhouse of the American city, large or small. It must also be said that what we like to call " beauty " is quite as lacking as strength. Though Americans overcrowd their houses with " ornaments " and furniture, yet the Japanese walls are bare almost to barrenness, and the benches rough. In one respect, however, and that most important, is a happy element to be found, — the management of the light of each room. The windows are large, set on one wall usually, and the light falls over the left shoulder of the seated pupil.

One of the most evident problems which American and Japanese institutions situated in the city — and most Japanese higher institutions are in a city — have in common, is the problem of getting land for buildings. Not long before his death, Provost Pepper, of the University of Pennsylvania, walking over the grounds of Western Reserve University, said to me, " Get land." The remark grew out of his own experience. The remark may be made a command for most urban institutions in both Japan and America. The University of Tokyo has about one hundred acres for its fifty and more buildings. The sister university at Kyoto is not cramped.

The great institution of the Methodist Church at Tokyo has some twenty-four acres. But most colleges and schools are poor in land. The Waseda University at Tokyo, of some eight thousand students, the Doshisha at Kyoto, of eight hundred, the Japan Women's University, of fourteen hundred, and also the Presbyterian schools, all at Tokyo, and many others, do not have room to grow. What renders the limitations more serious is that the price of land in the great towns has increased by such leaps and bounds that to make purchases at present would require twenty or in some cases even fifty times the price originally asked.

This problem of the budget has relations also to larger appropriations for libraries, for scientific apparatus, for keeping buildings clean and well repaired and grounds aesthetically beautiful. In these several and diverse respects, Japanese universities and colleges are sympathetic with American. But in respect to books the Japanese institutions labor under a double disadvantage. For they are obliged to buy not only all the proper books of their own writing, but also all those of English, German, and French authorship which relate to the great scholastic subjects and movements. The best library, that of the University of Tokyo, is as good as the better college libraries of America, but by no means approaches the best, such as those of Harvard, Columbia, and Yale. The lack of proper appropriations is evident also in the untidiness of the academic housekeeping. Buildings are not clean. " What is your greatest problem?" an American college president was asked. " To get floors washed often enough," was his answer. The same problem exists in the universities of Japan, and it is not answered so well as in those of America. Japan's reputation, too, for fine gardens and landscape architecture is depreciated through the lack of plan and of care manifest in most college grounds. The contrast between Tokyo and Kyoto and Oxford and Cambridge is painful ; but the contrast also between the Japanese and many American universities would be altogether in favor of the American. The reason lies back in the budget.

In passing, it may be added that the Japanese colleges , like the American, have in the past paid little attention to the counsels of either the landscape or the building architect. The location of buildings has been too much like the location of the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence, haphazard, and the buildings themselves lack both individual beauty and collective impressiveness.

Japan is also struggling with the problem of America in respect to big academic names for small academic institutions. The name " university" is given to an institution which off ers instruction less advanced and of no better quality than the " higher normal school " of Japan gives. Institutions put forth " claims " which represent hopes rather than present values. The traditional self-restraint of the nation is not manifest in its academic ambition.

The salaries of teachers are, also, small, as are the fees of students. In the higher elementary schools the largest salaries for men are about ten dollars a month, and for women about seven dollars. In the last four years hese stipends have increased, but only by inconsiderable amounts. In Japan, as in the United States, a good carpenter receives a larger wage than a good elementary schoolteacher. The professors in both of the Imperial Universities, as well as the teachers in many higher schools, have spoken freely to me of the hardships arising from their small stipends. These stipends run from five hundred to twelve hundred dollars. For foreigners the amounts are double or triple these sums. But such salaries are entirely inadequate. The Japanese style of living is simple. But house-rent is seldom less than fifteen dollars a month, and readily becomes thirty or forty dollars. The price of rice has rapidly and greatly advanced. It was never so high as to-day. The Japanese professor is finding his economic burden quite as heavy as is the American.

But this low rate of compensation is some-

■what relieved, though only in part, by a governmental pension system.

The pension system for public school-teachers has gained a more general prevalence in lapan than in the United States. Its progress in the United States, especially in the large cities, in the last ten years has been great ; but the larger part of the half million of teachers in the whole country are not its beneficiaries. The Japanese teacher is an official of the government; and as such is entitled to a grant on retirement. Teachers formerly in the elementary and secondary schools, to the number of more than five thousand, are now in receipt of pensions. These benefits are also continued to the families of teachers who have died. The amounts thus granted vary from about one fifth to one third of the salary formerly received.

An important element, at once a contrast and a likeness, is found in the studies which are pursued in both lower and higher schools. The same studies are found in the Japanese schools which are set in the corresponding

American schools, barring certain marked exceptions. Neither Latin nor Greek is studied. The civilization of the Far East is progressing without immediate reference to the classical traditions which have mightily influenced Western development. In them is found, of course, the Japanese language and literature, and also, in some, the Chinese language. The study of ethics is pursued also far more constantly than in the schools of Western nations. In the teaching of arithmetic the soroban, or abacus, is used. But with these rather impressive differences the curricula of the two systems are much alike.

The same subjects of study are, moreover, either popular or unpopular in the Japanese institution and in the American. The social sciences and history represent the more, and the mathematical sciences the less, popular. The Japanese mind is not a mathematical mind. It is not exact. Mathematics is not taught in any Japanese university to the extent in which it is taught in the best American colleges. There is little or no demand for the higher or the newer developments of the great subject. But political economy, sociology, the science of government, politics, represent topics in which the Japanese mind has intense interest. The same condition obtains in America.

The teachers of Japan are laboring with the question upon which American teachers are working, namely, the question of getting students to think. There is no difficulty in getting Japanese students to learn. The faculty of the memory is strong. The difficulty is to persuade students to learn less and to think more. Many students have not come to distinguish between these important functions. But teachers are becoming aware; for the loss which their students are incurring in sacrificing reflectiveness to acquisitiveness is constant and serious. The way of meeting this difficulty is still pretty obscure in both Japan and America. But one Japanese professor indicated a method which he believed had already proved to be of value. It lay in an examination not upon questions which related to the content of a subject, but which related to the consideration of the problems of thaf subject. A student would be tested upon his thinking out and solving the problems which arise in a course of instruction. Such questions I know thousands of teachers in American colleges prefer to set in an examination paper. Such questions it is hard to formulate; but such questions will become more common in both American and Japanese universities.

There is need, however, aside from the method and content of examinations that students should be so impressed with the importance of thinking as compared to learning that they will compel themselves to think. More of the mathematical necessity of thinking should be felt by them. This necessity they will in time come to feel for themselves, as already their teachers are feeling it for them.

A farther problem in which Japanese teachers as well as American are deeply concerned, is the giving of personal aid to students in the great interests of their lives. It is th( problem by what means and methods the character of the teacher may be brought to bear upon the character of the student. The diffi culty in the question arises from the great number of students and also from the work of the teacher in research. When one teacher has two hundred or four hundred students, he is usually prevented from giving much individual help to each. When, also, a professor is deeply interested in research, as he ought to be, and interested in publishing the results of his investigations, he feels he has little time or strength left for the individual student. The condition in both Japanese and American institutions is identical. The dormitory system, at least indirectly if not directly, allows some teachers opportunities for studying the personal life of students. But Tokyo transferred not long ago its few dormitories to the Medical Department for hospital wards. It is now without any. " It was a great mistake," said a professor to me. Students' hostels under the charge of the Young Men'? Christian Association are doing much to meel this condition. The lack of opportunities open to the Japanese professor is greater than to the American. For the lecture system is far more common in Japan. The recitation system does give the teacher some little chance for making an inventory of the mind and heart of the student, and for discovering his point of view. But the Japanese college lecture is simply an academic address, in which practically no chance is open for the play and by-play of question and answer. Japanese professors, like the American, lament the condition, and are seeking a remedy ; but, so far, likewise, without worthy result.

The great questions in Japan, as in America, about which students crave counsel from their teachers, are ethical and religious questions. Such questions are most vital, personal, serious. In Japan these questions are tremendously significant. For students in lifting their own lives and the lives of their fellow countrymen who are less favored out of moral unworthiness, need all the advice and inspiration which their teachers of widest experience and warmest regard can give.

A contrast is to be found, and one, too, in favor of the Eastern nation, in respect to school attendance. At the present time more than ninety-five per cent of the Japanese children who are of the elementary school-age are attending school. In the United States the proportion differs much for the different commonwealths, from Massachusetts with its high average to the states of the Southwest ; but the national contrast is to the advantage of Japan. The percentage, too, is constantly rising. In the last six years in the elementary schools, it has risen from about eighty-one to more than ninety-five. The increase for girls exceeds that for boys. In 1890-91 about seventy-one per cent of the girls were in school, and ninety per cent of the boys ; in 1905-06 the ratio had so changed that ninetyseven per cent of the boys and ninety-three per cent of the girls were in school.

For most of these pupils, education is not free in the sense in which it is in American schools. Above the primary grades a fee is charged. The fee is ridiculously small, measured by Western standards of value; but measured by Japanese standards, its aggregate represents a large income for the statec The Japanese home, be it said, seems willing to meet this small tax. In the higher primaryschool the fee paid for each pupil each month runs from fifteen cents to thirty ; in the middle (or grammar) school the fee is seldom less than fifty cents a month, or more than a dollar and twenty cents; in the high school it is ten dollars a year, and in the universities about eighteen dollars. Certain exemptions are made in cases of poverty.

Passing from the more ordinary types of public school education to the form of the higher education, the same contrast is noted. Many higher schools are able to receive only a small proportion of the students who desire to enter. In ways either direct or indirect most American colleges seek for students. The higher schools of Japan have no need of conducting such a campaign. For most of them are full, too full, and clamoring applicants to the number of thousands find the academic gates shut in their faces. The universities and what America would call col leges are few. The two universities of Tokyt and Kyoto are able to receive most applicants ; but the provision offered at the normal schools and some technical institutions is utterly inadequate. Of the more than twentytwo thousand applicants at the normal schools last year, less than five thousand were received. In certain individual schools only one applicant in ten is admitted. In some medical schools a similar proportion of admissions to applications prevails. The Japanese government has so far been unable to offer sufficient facilities for the higher education of her people ; every year either old institutions are enlarged or new ones founded. In the coming year four new scientific schools or colleges will be opened. Japanese young men look upon education as the ladder leading to the richest opportunities and the highes' achievements. Year after year, only a hundred out of a thousand applicants to some schools are received. The test is made by examination. Those who are rejected, it may be added, represent in Japan a contingent which proves to be a cause of watchfulness to the police force of Tokyo and other great towns. Unwilling to return to their homes in the country, lean in purse, loath to do the homely work which may offer, they are a pregnant cause of social peril.

In Japan, as in America, the student of slender purse, but high ambition, is common. The methods used for aiding him in Japan are unlike those employed in America. In America the college to which he goes aids by grants of money, or by securing opportunities of self- support. The record which almost every college could publish is a noble one. But in Japan the aid is usually given by the locality in which the student lives. There are more than a hundred student aid societies. They are largely maintained by the wealthier people of the province or neighborhood. One of these societies, which is probably the best endowed, has a fund of about $350,000. The aid is given usually in the form of loans, running from about $2.50 to $5.00 a month. Even the larger amount would not be called extravagant ; but when it is remembered that for one hundred dollars a student can meet all his expenses for a year at one of the higher institutions, the amount may be deemed liberal.

For the cost of education seems small, very small. The following is the estimate made by one of the private universities for each year of a course of five years : —

Tuition fee $18.00

Room rent (11 mo.) 19.25

Classroom charge 1.50

Physical training 1.50

Books, stationery, etc 30.00

$103.25

This estimate, I believe, the catalogue of our American college, in its ordinary statement of the different types of students' expenses, would describe as " economical ! " For in the American college the corresponding charges which the student would meet would be for tuition from $100 to $150, for board and room from $175 to $400 or more, and for incidentals a sum far in excess of the