Of Confucius, Holy Clowns, and Holy Murder:
Some Advantages of Chinese Religious Atheism

I. Why Today’s Students, Particularly, Should Care

Why should anybody today care about knowing ancient Chinese religion? A few sentences can make the case:

First, anyone who is East Asian — Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Thai, Vietnamese — should care because their family life and personality are very likely molded by the ideas that arise in the Warring States Period.

Even people who are not East Asian have good reason to learn it: it’s no secret that the 21st Century is shaping up to be the Century of China (and, yes, India), so odds are that anybody with a future will cross paths with East Asia either socially, romantically, or professionally. So they should know what a different world they’re entering when they do, and thus be able to navigate that world with better success, be it at the business dinner or the girl-friend’s parent’s dinner.

A third reason, of course, is that it’s simply good mental traveling to learn about all this.

II. Confucianism

Point blank: when we talk about East Asia, we’re talking about Confucius, the man most religious studies scholars agree is by far the most influential “religious” figure and moral philosopher of all time — more than Moses, Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed. One in four people on the planet today is Chinese; from the beginning of history to today, China’s population has always been larger than that of Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and the Americas. And China’s  people — plus, later, those of Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore — have lived the core Confucian values since 200 years before Jesus until today. (And they live them seven days a week, not just on the Sabbath.)

Even Christianized Asians live Confucian lives as their daily norm: family values, respect for elders and authorities, humility and a distaste for vulgarity and boasting, a gentle distaste for conflict, the importance of “face” and, glaringly obvious at SAS, of education — all of those things go back to Confucius.

So understanding Confucius is understanding most of East Asia today — from family life to social attitudes to manners and etiquette and sexual norms. (And to understand Confucius, the Shujing we read from last week will take you a long way.)

Second, Confucius is not a teacher about religion and life after death; on the contrary, his focus is the good life on earth, and how to live it wisely, happily, and graciously. When asked about who made the universe, where we go after we die, and the other Ten Thousand Unknowable Things, Confucius said:

To know when you know something, and to know when you don’t know something: that is wisdom.

He knew humans don’t know about the Unknowable, so he advised it best to pay attention to ritual and ceremony, yes, but to keep a clean distance from questions that can’t be answered — and from people who claim they know the answers. He thought those people dangerous to social order, and their superstitious claims dangerous to individual intelligence.

The Analects, the major collection of Confucius’ alleged sayings as recorded by his students, is a refreshingly easy book to read. Nothing in it is hard to believe except that its common sense and rationalism, which arrived in the West only during the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment a short 500 years ago, rose in China a very long two thousand, five hundred years ago.

III. A Holy Clown: Zhuangzi and the Tao

Zhuangzi dreaming he's a butterfly dreaming he's Zhuangzi dreaming...

And while Confucius does have a sense of humor in places, it’s one that at most makes you smile a little as you read. Like practically every other religion or philosophy, laughter and a sense of humor seem somehow against the rules. Confucius is serious this way too. But his “opponents,” the Daoists? They give us laughs by the belly-full, while all the while discussing the same subjects the more sober religions talk about. Reading the great Zhuangzi, Daoism’s second great sage, is like reading Jesus doing stand-up comedy. You can’t help but love the guy. He’s a hoot, and he’s also as deep as they come (in my book, anybody who insists there’s nothing unholy about laughter, that it’s every bit as sacred as all the more depressing emotions we usually find glooming up houses of worship, is wise by definition. Why shouldn’t laughter and play count among the holy things? What’s more heavenly than that?).

Zhuangzi had no patience for the Confucians. He was an individualist and an escapist, believing the wisest reaction to suffering is not to try to “fix the problem,” but instead to flow with it, “like water — seeking the path of least resistance.” You can’t fix human society any more than you can fix an earthquake or a drought. You fix your own mind’s way of reacting to things, stop freaking out when life is hard, slow down and enjoy it, and don’t get caught up chasing gold and honors. It’s all a fool’s errand to him. He prefers to go fishing and tell good, deep, playful stories. Your favorite weird uncle. (And one of my five favorite human beings in history.)

IV. A Tangent: Connections to Greece

These might help, if you remember the basics about Greece from other classes:

Greek and Chinese philosophy share a sort of “philosophical relay race” pattern: Socrates taught Plato, and Plato taught Aristotle. In China, Confucianism has a similar threesome: Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi.

Socrates, like Confucius, never wrote his philosophy down. We know Socrates through the writings of Plato, yet Plato took Socrates’ ideas into areas Socrates may not have agreed with. Similarly, Mencius studied under Confucius’ grandson, so there’s a Socrates-Plato/Confucius-Mencius pattern there.

Aristotle studied under Plato, but ended up arguing against his master. Xunzi similarly argues against Mencius concerning, above all, human nature. As Ebrey explains, Mencius thought human nature was essentially good, but a bad environment can corrupt it (thus the importance of a model king). Xunzi says this is naive, that human nature is prone to stupidity and vice, and thus needs education. (Not the kind of education in today’s world, which more and more seems to teach that education is simply a means for getting a job and making a lot of money, which is what success means. Confucians taught that the pleasures of an educated life are themselves the wealth, and the success. The gold is in the mind, not the bank.)

Xunzi is also interesting as the first flat-out atheist in Chinese philosophy. Confucius was not, mind you, an atheist. He said “We can’t know about God, Gods, and before and after life.” That’s an agnostic position: “a-” means “not,” and “gnostic” means “knowledge” — so Confucius is agnostic. Xunzi is different. He says, flat out, no gods are out there, as plain as an atheist can put it. But he continues with a totally interesting argument: “Even though all of this religious belief is superstitious nonsense, we should continue and support it.” Why? Because first, rituals are beautiful. They add pleasing colors to our days. And second, they’re useful. People need an outlet for fears of death and frustrations with life, so let them pray away, even though it’s totally pointless. You AP Lit people might think of Aristotle’s argument that Greek Tragedy was healthy because it was “cathartic” — it let people drain out all of their fear and horror at the dark sides of life. Xunzi seems to think religion is a similarly useful form of “mental hygiene.”

And then there’s Laozi, Daoism’s “Old Master.” Laozi wrote the Dao de Jing (“The Classic of the Way”), and it’s so deep, mysterious, and paradoxical that I pretty much refuse to even try to teach it to high schoolers. Deer in headlights gazes is all I’ve seen each time I’ve had students read it. So taste it if you’re curious, but we won’t focus on it in class much, if at all. We’ll focus on Zhuangzi instead.

V. Holy Murderers

There’s one final “So what?”, and I’ll close with it: it’s tantalizing to wonder what Jesus and Mohammed would have thought about Confucius. I picture them totally approving of his morality: he argues, like they do, that greed and the fever for gold are vulgar and the “root of all evil.” He also argues that we should love our neighbors and treat everyone well. Confucius, too, would approve of the moral teachings of Jesus and Mohammed — at least their social ones. But Confucius probably would have drawn the line at believing their claims to “know” about beginnings and endings, heavens and hells, spirits and demons. One can only imagine how interesting their conversations would be if they had the chance to debate these things. And while that’s impossible, of course, somehow it still points to something I notice every time I pass through airports in the Middle East, the West, and in China: pretty much everywhere but China, soldiers patrol airports looking for suicide bombers — and they obviously do it for good reason. Muslims, Jews, and Christians have been fighting for thousands of years because of their conflicting knowledge-claims based on their ancient religious texts.

But traveling through Confucian airports, you simply don’t see these soldiers, and you don’t see the terror threats (nor do you see doctors who provide abortions being murdered by Those Who Know When the Soul Enters the Embryo, or political priorities in an age of global warming, economic chaos, and several other urgent problems, being dominated by strange issues like gay marriage by  Those Who Know that Homosexuality is an Abomination. Chinese newspapers and TV don’t argue about whether their president is a secret Muslim, either. On and on.)

Confucian countries are free of all of these strange things because in their culture, they know, thanks to Confucius, that they are Those Who Cannot Know Some Answers and, knowing they can’t know these things, they have no such Knowledge to Kill For. In their airports, instead of soldiers patrolling for Those Who Do, you more often see just a bunch of families, parents leading the kids, the kids leading their suitcases stuffed with textbooks, cramming that education day and night to please their parents — people who don’t know what any Creator of the Universe thinks, but who do know this: family is important, and education is important.

And it’s all because of a guy who read the Shujing during the Warring States Period 500 years before Jesus, thought it was wise, taught it to students, and left teachings that, 2,500 years later, have worked for more than half of the world.

Related posts:

1. Chinese v. Western History: A Few “Mental Party” Highlights
2. Voltaire: On Fanaticism and Holy Murder
3. Fugue: Jesus, Plato, Confucius, Goldman Sachs
4. Farewells, Four Loves, Confucius, etc.

Remember, this is a man with that old-fashioned European humanist faith in the library as a model of good society and spiritual regeneration – a man who once went so far as to declare that “libraries can take the place of God.”

–Lee Marshall, “The World According to Eco,” Wired.com

I have a hallway for literature that’s 70 meters long. I walk through it several times a day, and I feel good when I do. Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes. Of course, nowadays I can find this kind of information on the Internet in no time. But, as I said, you never know with the Internet.

–Umberto Eco, ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’ (interview in Der Spiegel )

I’ll reward any geek-genius a million cool-points who can teach me how to make this possible on Mac OS X Snow Leopard: “Spotlight” search results with contextual lines around search terms for each file that matches the search.

You know, a Spotlight search that doesn’t look like this:

–but instead, looks like this:

Here’s the vision: My hard drive has dozens and dozens of carefully selected ebooks about my areas of interest right now — primarily World History and Chinese History. I’ve invested a good bit of cash into this because I want a “searchable academic library” on my laptop, out of the following heretical conviction: academic ebooks on a hard drive are a better resource than the internet. Think about it: less time sifting through online search hits; less time evaluating each site’s reliability; higher quality writing; deeper depth of coverage and analysis; broader sample of perspectives from reputable historians specializing in the topics of interest.

Interlude: “I Won’t Go Off on How Exciting This Is”

(I won’t go off on how exciting I find this historically new possibility to have an entire library of hundreds of books in your laptop — a portable, personalized university library, so to speak — ready to be searched, sorted, sifted, copied, compiled, compared, and to generally give you a booklover’s orgasm for its technological speed and literary quality. I just won’t. I won’t say another word about the literal thousands of books you can fit on a standard 500 gigabyte hard drive today, and all but the last few decades of them free and public domain. Not a word, I tell you. I’ll just pretend it’s nothing to get excited about, mention how this idea relates to Umberto Eco’s insistence that personal libraries are more valuable for the books they contain that you haven’t read — but might one day need to crack open to satisfy a spontaneous blast of learning-lust — than for the ones that you have read. Not a word.)

Back to the Geek Challenge:

Let me illustrate:

I posted a vodcast about the Opium Wars and the Fall of the Qing Dynasty on Youtube last year for my History of China course, embedded it on my class Ning for my students to watch and/or download, then promptly ignored the YouTube page. But a couple of days ago I went there for some reason, and discovered a couple thousand visits and a dozen or more comments from the world. Some were the barbaric doozies you’d expect from the Wingnutosphere, but others were quite good — to wit: One viewer questioned a claim I made in the lecture about opium being illegal in England at the very same time England was illegally forcing it on the Chinese market. He said he thought opium was legal in England until the 20th century.

I could have googled “opium england illegal” or whatnot and spent 30 minutes doinking around Wikipedia’s “further reading” links, other sites’ “about” pages, etc. But I knew I had several ebooks on 19th century Chinese history in a folder, so I entered those terms in my spotlight instead, and promptly found info confirming my visitor was right (and interestingly enough, that the famous claim in the open letter of China’s Commissioner Lin to Queen Victoria was also factually wrong), while at the same time being able to read several pages that went deeply into opium use in 19th c. England. It took less than 10 minutes, and had the imprimatur of Oxford, Harvard, and similar ivied fauntleroys to ban the “But is this credible?” goblins from the learning.

The screenshot of that dialogue below (click image to enlarge) shows the quality of the ebook search versus a Wikipedia search, if you look at the level of detail in the passages I copy-pasted into the thread:

Upshot: What I’m envisioning is the ability to integrate ebook search results in classroom discussions. If a question like the Youtube gent’s above came up in class, this type of quick search would be entirely practical and seamless, unlike many a web-search. But, to get back to my original request, it would be even more magical if my hard drive search results looked more like Google’s, and less like Mac’s. (And the possibilities for speeding up the compilation of course packets with sets of pages extracted from the ebooks is another shiny bit of awesome.)

Let me close with a) a prayer that Miguel Guhlin (who has always struck me as an über-geek in the best possible way) answers this trackback and takes on the challenge; and b) since I never thought to share that 20-minute vodcast on the Opium Wars — a fascinating and tragic story that every Westerner should know, if they want to understand better how China sees the Western world — what the hey, here it is. I spent a goodly number of hours on it, which is no guarantee that the investment paid off for the viewers. You tell me:

.

.

8 Comments

• At July 17, 2010, Miguel Guhlin wrote:

  For fun, I wrote it up at - http://www.mguhlin.org/2010/07/seeking-white-hart.html

• At July 17, 2010, Stephen Downes wrote:

  The images in this post are .tiff but .tiff is a non-standard image format for the web and will not be viewable by most users.

  When posting images to the web, images should be .gif .jpg or .png only.

• At July 17, 2010, John Larkin wrote:

  Hi Clay, I wonder if tossing the eBooks in the Web folder of your user folder followed by the creation of a simple HTML page with an embedded Google search directed at that specific local folder would work? Crude and basic but maybe. I might try tmw when I awake. Cheers, John.

• At July 18, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Fixed, noted, and thanks. (This post shows how un-geeky I am, and so does your comment.)

• At July 18, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  John, that's intriguing. I follow as far as creating the folder in the "Sites" folder, but beyond that...

  If you do try it, let us know if you've solved the challenge, and teach us. Thanks

• At July 18, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  And Stephen, while we're educating, I'll just share more by saying that Mac's "Grab" app takes .tiff's by default, whereas CMD + Shift + 4 takes screenshots in .png format. So the second alternative is better for web-bound screenshots.

  Thanks again for the lesson.

• At July 21, 2010, Thomas Aquinas wrote:

  I don't have the time to code it right now, but methinks that you could use OSX's unix grep capabilities and combine them with this Python library: http://www.boddie.org.uk/david/Projects/Python/pdftools/index.html.

• At July 21, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  I can't believe I'm replying to Thomas Aquinas. Wow.

  And I'm crestfallen at the blank look in my eyes when they see the words "code" and "python," and tantalized that you sense a solution.

  Curious: how much time would it take a geek to do such coding?

  Thanks for dropping in.

Related posts:

1. Another Edublogger IQ Challenge: Geography Time
2. Second-hand Reflection on NECC 2008
3. This Wiki Stuff Gets Easier and Easier
4. How Modern People Read

What he expresses in these screenshots from a PBS Newshour clip of the manuscript suggests why he might have wanted these thoughts to stay silent for a century. And they’re strangely resonant in our own day.

Exhibit One: Twain as the Fifth Horseman

This reads like something straight out of Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, or Hitchens:

Transcribed:

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is — in our country, particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree — it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime — the invention of Hell.  Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

Exhibit Two: Twain Against the Neocons

This snippet, if you look at the top, picks up after quoting Pres. Theodore Roosevelt’s apparent statement concerning a US Army massacre of Philippinos during or after the Spanish-American War.

Transcribed:

[TR's] whole utterance is merely a convention. Not a word of what he said came out of his heart. He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms — and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets….

Who wants to place bets that teaching Twain in American high schools is going to become an even dicier idea once this book filters out into the mainstream?

And who else notes that Twain’s objections both to American religion and American politics are based on simple morality — that standard so important to so many free-thinking heretics?

5 Comments

• At July 11, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Twain's weird story The Mysterious Stranger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger) gave many clues as to these thoughts... I was surprised and amazed when I stumbled across Mysterious Stranger some years ago completely by accident, and it definitely made me appreciate Twain even more. Excerpt:

  Satan laughed his unkind laugh to a finish; then he said: "It is a remarkable progress. In five or six thousand years five or six high civilizations have risen, flourished, commanded the wonder of the world, then faded out and disappeared; and not one of them except the latest ever invented any sweeping and adequate way to kill people. They all did their best - to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history - but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian - not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those to kill missionaries and converts with."

• At July 12, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Wow, Laura, nice find.

  Interesting that he wrote this from 1890 to 1910. That perfectly bookends the Boxer Rebellion in China, during which Chinese locals got fed up with missionaries and their Chinese converts ("rice Christians") and went on, as your Twain quote pegs it, "to kill missionaries and converts."

  Unfortunately for them, they didn't have the cash to buy the Western guns, and believed their own superstitious magic would protect them from the Western armies (always ready to back up beleaguered missionaries via the infamous "Gunboat Diplomacy"). It didn't. Instead, the West used it as a pretext to invade Beijing, storm and loot the Forbidden City and Imperial Library of much of their treasure, and finally to force more concessions to Western imperialist nations than they'd already forced after the Opium Wars of the 1840s and '60s.

  It amazes me that Westerners know so little of their crimes against China a short century ago. China certainly hasn't forgotten it.

• At July 13, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  So true about Chinese history! One of the things that really struck me about the Robert McNamara documentary Fog of War was the his admission that during the Vietnam War he knew nothing at all of Vietnamese history and only later, as he learned about it, did he gain some insight into the dynamics that he was oblivious to during the war itself!

  About Mysterious Stranger: I was listening to a bunch of public domain audiobook stuff five or six years ago and stumbled across this book. It had me completely mesmerized. I could definitely see myself teaching a course on folklore and literature about the devil - what a device he is for intense thought experiments! This book would definitely be on the reading list for such a class...

• At July 14, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  @Laura, Fog of War is a great film, and so are so many other documentaries by that filmmaker (whose name senescence hides from me at the moment).

  McNamara's a great example of an expert who knew next to nothing about Asia. If he'd looked into Vietnamese or Chinese history, he'd have quickly found that China tried to conquer Vietnam -- as a neighboring state with far larger forces -- for 2,000 years, and never could. The Vietnamese never say "quit."

  The Twain story is on my reading list.

• At July 16, 2010, Harold Jarche » From Mark Twain to the Future wrote:

  [...] Mark Twain’s Posthumous Bombshells by @cburell Why is Mark Twain’s autobiography only coming out now, 100 years after his death? Because he stipulated so before dying. [...]

Related posts:

1. When Corrupting the Youth is Good
2. Fear-Based Curriculum: A Language Arts Tragedy (More on Teaching Lolita)
3. How Modern People Read
4. Meme: High School Daze to Praise (For Mature Audiences Only)

.

(h/t to Hullabaloo)

4 Comments

• At July 7, 2010, Michael Doyle wrote:

  My mom grew up with Georgie--he was the only one in her NYC neighborhood who could skate faster than her.

  I grew up surrounded by prophets--George Carlin on stage is the same George Carlin you met in person. No wonder I'm a misfit.

• At July 17, 2010, Charlie A. Roy wrote:

  @ Clay

  A truly nice find.

• At July 18, 2010, Jane wrote:

  WOW! A couple years ago, I would have given a polite chuckle but thought it was just George's "fringe" rantings. Now with Arne Duncan and Bill Gates staking their claims over everything in my classroom...I get it! Thanks for the profound clip.

• At July 20, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  What's interesting is that a lot of serious political-economic academics have said the same thing for years. Carlin's an interesting guy. Was.

Related posts:

1. Remembering George W. Bush: Greatest Education President Ever
2. Reply to Gary Stager’s HuffPo Post on Duncan
3. Open Thread 2: Your Dream Elective Class for a 1:1 High School?
4. Daily Diigo: John Taylor Gatto Essays on School Reform

[A fun little conversation I'm having with Laura in this comment thread includes her question about differences between Chinese literary types and Western ones. It reminded me of this post I wrote last year on Change.org, and planned to cross-post here eventually anyway. I hope you agree that its quotes are lovely things.]

~     ~     ~

I just read a passage so striking I have to share it. It’s from Lin Yutang‘s 1936 book on China called My Country and My People, and is quoted in Richard E. Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (another keeper):

In Chinese literary criticism there are different methods of writing called “the method of watching a fire across the river” (detachment of style), “the method of dragonflies skimming across the water surface” (lightness of touch), “the method of painting a dragon and dotting its eyes” (bringing out the salient points). (p. 18)

Nisbett’s whole point in this book of “cultural psychology” is to show that modes of thought differ from culture to culture, that Enlightenment universalism is belied by the evidence, etc, etc. The point of the passage itself is to illustrate how unlike our abstract and essentialist Greek way of thinking is the Chinese, which resists hard categories and prefers, as Nisbett puts it, “expressive, metaphoric language.”

I’m going to follow the dragonfly method and leave it to you to watch the ripples of that quote, or not. Just two quick impressions before I go:

First, it somehow ties to the notion of Core Knowledge, and underscores to me the need for that “Core” to be wordly, and not ethnocentric, in order to avoid a sort of in-bred genetic shallowness. We can learn much by trying to see through Chinese eyes, for example, and see our own cultural “core” differently, and surely often benefit from that. (Hell, the Greeks learned from traveling to Egypt, Crete, Asia Minor and the Levant, and North Africa anyway. Their knowledge came less from the core than that far-flung periphery, and it’s the synthesis they performed with it all that was the thing.)

Second, as a writing teacher, I cannot wait to share the above with students. Our Western language for teaching writing does seem, as Nisbett claims, abstract and categorical and, when you think about it from the Chinese angle, mind-numbingly dull: “expository,” “persuasive,” “argumentative,” “analytical,” and so forth are not words to inflame a young mind. But “watching the fire from across the river”? “Skimming the water like a dragonfly”? “Dotting the dragon’s eyes”? Oh, yes.

(Third: point two illustrates point one.)

Image by I’mBatman

Originally posted 4/12/09 on Change.org’s Education blog.

12 Comments

• At July 3, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Thanks Clay for this very interesting post. We learn those metaphors when young, in fact in Grade 6 (around 12 years old).

  May I clarify a bit on the “watching the fire from across the river”? “Skimming the water like a dragonfly”? “Dotting the dragon’s eyes”?

  1. Watching the fire from across the river means to be detached from the problem, and be an observer. There are subtle meaning here, but when used in in real life setting, it means that you need to ensure your safety, and so don't get yourself into trouble, in case of conflict.

  2. Skimming the water like a dragonfly refers to light touch on a subject, and has a philosophical tone - especially when giving a speech, where one wants to briefly mention about a topic, but not in depth. Another use would be its application in dancing, where one is dancing with such lightness who seems to float.

  3. Dotting the dragon’s eyes - This relates to an old Chinese story. It was about an artist who drew a dragon, but then when the eyes were dotted, the dragon actually flied away. In the dragon dance, the dragon won't have her life unless the eyes are dotted, which is also part of the ceremony at the start of dragon dance. I think people might have then interpreted such dotted of the eyes as the symbolic meaning of drawing out of salient points in an artifact.

  There have been lots of "interpretations" of those metaphors, analogies in Chinese stories, and sometimes, due to the translation from ancient Chinese colloqualism to English, the meaning might have been shifted, exaggerated, or used with a new context.

  There are many versions of these translations, and I don't think there are universal versions which could provide unique explanation. The Lin Yutang Wikipedia entry is reliable.

  As I learnt these at a young age, so it was based on my memory and interpretation.

  Cheers.

  John

• At July 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Wonderful comment, John. If I can persuade you to write about where you were when you learned these as a child, and go more deeply into it, skimming-like, in a memoir piece on your blog, and then to drop a link here so I and others can read it, I'll be a happy man.

  I just bought Lin's book, so I'll be looking into it soon enough.

  Thanks for dropping in,

  Clay

• At July 3, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Oh oh oh, you are ringing my bells here... this is exactly the kind of thing I was trying to get at with the ability to let the metaphorical expression of a proverb and its analytical interpretation sit side by side in your mind, not just decoding the form in order to extract the abstract interpretation (and banish the image), but letting them both stand in your mind together and resonate - not forcing the firefly skimming the water to be "only" a firefly but at the same time not losing the firefly even as you let it lead your mind somewhere beyond to other ideas.

  I think you are spot on to identify the Greeks as a crucial turning point in the abstracting and essentializing of things. The word "idea" itself is a great example: Greek eidos and the related word eidolon (whence "idol") were originally words from the realm of the visual, from the seeing of things ("idea" is related linguistically to the "video" we borrowed from Latin). But as the philosophical tradition worked its powers of abstraction and essentializing on the "ideas" they lost their sense of vision and became invisible. Poof: they're gone! Abstracted from the world into the uncertain terrain of our minds.

  Have you read The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain…? Fabulous stuff, I think - very provocative and useful whether you agree or disagree with the directions he goes with that. I learned recently that Shlain has died (http://leonardshlain.com/blog/?p=101)… very sad! I think he still must have had a lot of good books in him that he did not have time to leave behind for us to enjoy and learn from!

• At July 4, 2010, Joan Vinall-Cox wrote:

  Fascinating. I was lucky enough to write an Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry thesis and, although I like theory, that approach allowed me to be metaphorical, poetical, and visual, which was the only way I could truly dot (my) dragon's eye. I guess that's why I thoroughly enjoyed writing it.

• At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Thanks Clay for your response. I was educated in Hong Kong and learned these in La Salle Primary School. I could elaborate these in my blog at a later stage, if you wish to know more about Chinese philosophy and how it is applied in our life.

  I liked writings very much and you could find some of my writings here http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com and Ning Community Network http://connectivismeducationlearning.ning.com plus my postings on Facebook.

  I like to write about different topics in my blog, and some of my posts relate to Chinese philosophy in education and learning.

  If you are interested in Chinese philosophies, then may I suggest you check these topics out? I Ching, Tao Te Ching, and the Sun Tze 36 military strategies. There are plenty of artifacts on these on wikipedia, Google, Google scholar links, etc. I could also refer you to the officical website from Chinese education authorities if that is of intersts to you. Let me know if you would like to have them.

  You could forward me with an email or via your blog post or mine for further connections. You could check out my other details on Facebook and Twitter too (under suifaijohnmak)

  There are huge potentials in the use of Chinese metaphors - Yin/Yang that is part of Tao Te Ching in understanding nature (see the metaphors on my blogs - with tags of metaphors), in writings, or in education and learning.

  Please note that I am a Catholic and so my belief stems strongly with a Christian belief. However, you may find many Chinese teachings and philosophies align with the teachings of Christ - in passion, in love, in personal integrity (trustworthiness, honesty), and altruism etc.

  Finally, I have read a few of posts before and found them very intersting and inspiring.

  John

• At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Here is my combined response post with some links to site http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/a-response-to-what-china-can-teach-writing-teachers/

  Cheers.

  John

• At July 4, 2010, Lewis wrote:

  As an American writing teacher in China I can and cannot agree with the title of this post. My college students in Beijing must learn academic writing .While these academic styles may not be "words to inflame a young mind" it is a necessary style to learn for academic writing. For other writing styles such as creative writing or personal narratives, or novel writing , or children's books, etc, the above post title can fit and I will agree with the premise.

• At July 4, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi again and thanks for the reply, JSF.

  I'm pretty good on Chinese philosophy and history - I taught it in Shanghai, where I lived for six years, and I'm teaching it here in Singapore. I'm currently in the middle of quite a few books -- Oxford History of Ancient China (1180 pages!), Brooks and Brooks' Original Analects, Fung Yu-Lan's History of Chinese Philosophy, plus the Book of Documents, Book of Songs, Zuo Chronicles, and Sima Qian's works; and I hope to read the Three Kingdoms, Monkey, Plum in the Golden Vase, and Dream of the Red Chamber and other literary classics before the end of the year -- to dig deeper.

  And while I'm not an adherent of any institutional religion -- I'm an ex-Christian who still has much respect for the teachings of Jesus, but few for the dogmas that Rome and the Protestant Church (not much different in terms of the basic creed) attached to his story -- I do find Zhuangzi and Confucius combined about as rich and credible as any ethical-metaphysical system has been on this planet.

  So I guess we balance each other ;-)

  Anyway, the broad strokes, and many of the finer ones, in Chinese history and culture I get. But the little peeks at such things as its rhetorical tradition and approaches that Lin points to above? These don't find their way into most historical writings. Thus the delight at bumbling across them in a book and wanting to know more.

  All for now and take care.

• At July 4, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Um, Lewis, I can't find any assertion in the post that college students shouldn't learn academic writing.

  But the second half of your comment gets closer to what I did mean to imply.

  Thanks for dropping in,

  Clay

• At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Thanks Clay for sharing your background experience. I greatly appreciate your intersts in the literary classis. When I was in my high school, we were free to study to Three Kingdoms, Monkey, and Dream of the Red Chamber. However, in our lessons, there were only selected chapters from these three classics, and since they were written in colloquialism, we needed more elaboration from other literature review and teacher's guidance to understand the genre, syntax, semiotics and pragmatics of such colloquialism. There were other rich themes in ancient poets (the 5 and 7 "narrative" poets).

  Relating the Chinese literature, it was divided into the ancient and modern ones, which are based on the modern prose, which is more pragmatic and comprehensible. Nowadays, most communication in Chinese are based on plain simple Chinese syntax, that was all originated from the "evolution" of modernisation of Chinese language.

  I think you could trace back lots of traditional metaphors, though the modern interpretation might be a bit difficult to comprehend, as one must consider the historical context, and why those metaphors were used.

  Relating to religious belief, thanks for the great sharing. I respect your belief, and so I am delighted to see its significance in one's writings too.

  Take care and best wishes from John

• At July 28, 2010, Cristy wrote:

  An interesting post. The native americans in our area describe their language as representative of their religion. I think that is often the case in other cultures. Ours represents the “expository,” “persuasive,” “argumentative,” “analytical,” because of our Judaeo/

  christian heritage. Cristy

• At July 30, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Cristy,

  Sorry to be so late on this, but I'd say those categories are far more Greek than Hebrew. Know what I mean?

Related posts:

1. Beyond RSS: Using Alltop.com to Teach Writing
2. Questioning What it Means to Teach "Writing" in the Third Millenium
3. Unschooly Students on Teachers Teaching Teachers
4. How Radio News-Writing and -Announcing Make for Ideal, Literacy-Focused Performance Assessment

Readers of George Orwell’s Animal Farm should remember Squealer, the pig whose “journalism” manipulated the entire animal society into unquestioningly supporting the dictatorial pig Napoleon.

If they studied Animal Farm in the classroom, the depressing odds are they learned it as a good, all-American attack on socialism. The most simple-minded of our teachers make a travesty of the novel’s allegory along these breathless lines:

Napoleon, children, equals Stalin and Karl Marx all rolled up in one. And Squealer equals their propaganda machine, the communist newspaper Pravda. Write ‘Pravda’ in your notes, children, because you have to know it for the test. It’s very important. It’s an example of journalism in communism, and how it prints government lies instead of the truth that we get in newspapers in free democracies.”

Of course, Animal Farm was more than that. Orwell was a socialist, after all — but he was also a thinker. So he could condemn what Stalin had done in the Soviet Union as a perversion of the socialist vision, while at the same time condemning the capitalism of  the United States and Western Europe with equal scorn.

That second part tends to get left out, I suspect, in discussions of capitalism and communism in most Western classrooms, whether English classes teaching Animal Farm or history classes teaching the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead, capitalism is trotted out in the white hat of “freedom and democracy,” and communism in the black hat of “tyranny and totalitarianism.”

Teachers and textbooks who frame the issue this way strangle the baby of inquiry in the cradle, and slip in its place a plump little bundle of propaganda to comfort the kids and teachers by cooing that they’re on the right side of history, and the enemy was on the wrong. But “Capitalism versus Communism” and “Democracy versus Dictatorship” aren’t simple “Good versus Bad,” “Right versus Wrong” stories. Both sides, the communist and the capitalist, have their strengths and weaknesses, their angels and demons, their moments of heroism and of villainy. Both sides.

So you don’t have to be a communist to criticize capitalism, or a capitalist to criticize communism. Thinkers in both camps criticize not just the other system, but their own. (Politicians do this routinely when they craft legislation.) Any classrooms learning about these two systems should front-load their explorations with that truth — assuming, at any rate, that we want to produce thinking citizens in our classrooms instead of bleating farm animals. It sometimes seems we don’t want to.

Breaking News: War is Peace. Torture is Justice.

From the indispensable Plum Line blog’s Greg Sargent at the Washington Post:

Harvard’s school of government has released a study of how major media discusses waterboarding that really seems like it was done for Glenn Greenwald.

Click on “released a study” above and you’ll get the full report in PDF. The Greenwald link is a rich resource for the classroom too.

And they’re “rich” because they call into question America’s mainstream media — the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and all the rest of the “free” press — and the bald similarities of Squealer and Pravda to the editors of those trusted institutions and their newspapers. (Torches down, dear nationalists: you should agree we have to read newspapers on two feet, like free-thinking humans, and not four, like all the sheep in Orwell and too many sheeple in America. Remember the good old days when an “informed citizenry” was a national ideal in America, before it was replaced with “a productive consumer” — a patriotic shopper?)

Need a teaser? From the study’s abstract:

The current debate over waterboarding has spawned hundreds of newspaper articles in the last two years alone. However, waterboarding has been the subject of press attention for over a century. Examining the four newspapers with the highest daily circulation in the country, we found a significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding. From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002‐2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture. In addition, the newspapers are much more likely to call waterboarding torture if a country other than the United States is the perpetrator. In The New York Times, 85.8% of articles (28 of 33) that dealt with a country other than the United States using waterboarding called it torture or implied it was torture while only 7.69% (16 of 208) did so when the United States was responsible. The Los Angeles Times characterized the practice as torture in 91.3% of articles (21 of 23) when another country was the violator, but in only 11.4% of articles (9 of 79) when the United States was the perpetrator.

This type of study is not new, I know. But this particular one recommends itself for use in the classroom for several reasons: it’s current. It’s clear. It’s free. It’s from Harvard. Oh, and it’s about the survival of the rule of law and human rights in the United States. Almost forgot that one.

Or we could just give the lambs a handout about Pravda and follow it with a quiz.

Update: The New York Times responds to the study, finds its inner Squealer. Life imitates (Orwellian) art.

Update 2: Joan McCarter at Daily Kos puts the Times‘ explanation for its Squealerism in the larger context in a must-read post. A snippet:

A Times spokesman gave Michael Calderone this incredible justification

“As the debate over interrogation of terror suspects grew post-9/11, defenders of the practice (including senior officials of the Bush administration) insisted that it did not constitute torture,” a Times spokesman said in a statement.

“When using a word amounts to taking sides in a political dispute, our general practice is to supply the readers with the information to decide for themselves. Thus we describe the practice vividly, and we point out that it is denounced by international covenants and in American tradition as a form of torture.”

So a rose is a rose until someone calls it a dandelion, for the purposes of a political point. The Gray Lady only prints what’s fit not to “take sides” over in a political dispute, creating, as Calderone puts it, “a factual contradiction between its newer work and its own archives.” And a factual contradiction between reality and Bush administration spin.

This is a very telling quote, because it shows just how easy it is to manipulate newspapers into exactly what they’re being constantly manipulated into–taking political sides by appearing not to take political sides.  All you have to do to dispute a known physical or legal fact is to… dispute it.  If you want to say that oil helps pelicans grow, you can just say it; the mere act of saying it will make it “disputed,” rendering the New York Times powerless to say flatly whether it is true or not. If it’s policy to not call a lie a lie in the name of “balance,” then the most basic function of that newspaper goes out the window. (read the rest)

Images:
(top) “All Animals are Equal” (detail) by Night Owl City
(middle) Animal Farm cover by Ben Templesmith
(bottom) USA Today truck by william couch

9 Comments

• At July 1, 2010, Ric Murry wrote:

  Clay,

  It is good to have you back writing these kinds of posts. I mean no offense by that statement, but you (like many of us), took a needed break from the kind of writing you do best. This is it.

  Jeez, what I wrote sounds terrible, but I hope our years of communicating and "debating" make it clear what I mean. There is a needed context for your other readers. So let me conclude by saying...THIS IS A GREAT POST, filled with thought-provoking, academically challenging, and multi-disciplinary information. That's what I like, and it is what you provide as well as any educator on the Internet.

• At July 1, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Ric,

  Your comment didn't offend me. It made me giggle.

  Because you're right about the "break," though the rest is up to question.

  Anyway, it finally feels good to write again, and encouraging to get good feedback.

  (And I'll probably always only write what I want to write, in the end, and leave it up to readers to filter. I miss the Unsucky Lectures most of all, but these little brainfarts like the one above keep nudging down the queue of things to finish.)

• At July 1, 2010, Ric Murry wrote:

  I always like the Unsucky Lectures too.

  If this is a "brainfart" may you head be filled gas in the years to come.

  Peace, my friend.

• At July 1, 2010, laura gibbs wrote:

  Thanks for sharing this piece! Made me think of this great piece here on euphemisms used by journalists and politicans, with some material in particular re: waterboarding and the term "abuse" v. "torture".

  Euphemism and American Violence

  April 3, 2008 - New York Review of Books

  by David Bromwich

  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/apr/03/euphemism-and-american-violence/

  (if that URL is too long, here's a tiny one: http://tinyurl.com/24mzr4v)

  Language. Very dangerous when it becomes the reality for us and we have nothing to compare it against...

• At July 1, 2010, Stephen Downes wrote:

  Anyone questioning Orwell's politics should read his diaries. They are being released one day at a time on the Orwell prize (where it is now July 1, 1940). http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/

  Fantastic reading and great insight. I've been following since 2008 (1938) - which until a couple weeks ago was not so exciting as it sounds, his main passions being his farm and the infamous egg count. The the outbreak of the war, it has been gripping reading (and makes the two years of pre-reading well worth while).

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  That "when we have nothing to compare it against" is an intriguing touch. I've been fortunate to stumble across the world against all odds -- working class boy -- and the realities I've discovered versus the ideas I had of them when an ocean-locked American still stagger me today. Those oceans make good walls, but the keep Americans in at the same time they keep attackers out.

  China's "godless Communists," to quote the Reagan mantra, are my favorite case in point. All in all, among the most wholesome "family values" types I've ever known, and the safest cities.

  Thanks for the link, Laura.

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Maybe it was you who initially tipped me off to the Orwell Diaries site, and I subscribed to it at least a year ago. But those mundane entries cluttering my feed made me grumpy, so I unsubscribed. At what date do they get interesting?

  (If you haven't read his essay, "Shooting an Elephant," about his days as a colonial grunt in India, fly, don't run, to Google for a great read.)

  Signed, C Burell (with one "r") ;-)

• At July 2, 2010, Stephen Downes wrote:

  > At what date do they get interesting?

  It's just been since the last couple of weeks.

• At July 2, 2010, Marie wrote:

  I think my favorite thing I hear in high school, though it is not entirely related to this post, is when people conflate fascism and communism. I so often hear that "Hitler was a communist". Ironically, this ordinarily comes from people teetering the lines of fascism in my small, red-neck town.

  I love your posts, by the way, and I wish my classes were as wonderful as yours appear to be. You sound like an excellent teacher who I would love to have.

Related posts:

1. Media Literacy for Google Fundamentalists
2. How Radio News-Writing and -Announcing Make for Ideal, Literacy-Focused Performance Assessment
3. A Real-World Mini-Lesson in Critical Reading and Writing
4. Beyond “Did You Know?” A Video for Viral Times: “Did You Ever Wonder?”

A teacher recently dismissed, I gather, for encouraging critical thinking in her class in (where else?) my native United States writes:

I am stunned by the number of “conservatives” who truly appear to loathe teachers. What is up with that? Why the distrust of educators?

And all I can say is, “Come teach in Asia. They respect teachers here.”

To back that up, a little story that taught me that about four years ago:

Passing Through Customs

During my five or six years teaching secondary history and literature in Shanghai in the early-to-mid ‘naughties, my hobby was going on DVD scavenger hunts. I’d spend a good four or five hours weekly, usually on Saturday afternoons, making the rounds through a handful of DVD shops I’d discovered had the richest selection of offerings, and in each one I would literally check each disc on its shelves for any new arrivals. We’re talking hundreds of discs, sometimes over a thousand, in each shop.

To understand the beauty of this ritual, you have to understand the Shanghai DVD shop at its best. Shanghai is as cosmopolitan as it gets. People from every point of the globe live there, and they’re all potential customers for these shops, which cater mostly to foreigners. So to skim their shelves is to skim through titles in Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Thai, on and on.

For a history teacher totally uninterested in this year’s version of a lame-ass Tom Cruise blockbuster, these shops were a fantasy land. I’d find dozens of films I never knew existed, exquisite things: documentaries from the Soviet Union mashing up footage from the Nazi archives they’d captured when they defeated Hitler, giving the Soviet take on Fascism and the Great Patriotic War; other documentaries from around the globe, like the incredible Darwin’s Nightmare, that Americans would never see or hear about at home; box sets of Tarkovsky, Fellini, Cassavetes, Bergman, Chaplin, Zhang Yimou, Kurosawa, and other international Shakespeares of the Film Age; concerts of Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Gustav Mahler, Beethoven, Nick Cave, Joni Mitchell, and other gods; on and on and on.

(Hey, if you click on all those links above on my blog instead of in your feed-reader, Apture popups will give you some wonderful clips from the directors and my favorite pieces from the musicians, links to Wikipedia, and more.)

Don’t tell anybody, but each of these items cost one to five US bucks. For the price of a fine meal that would turn to feces within four hours (pity the poor “live to eat” types), I’d come home with a feast of hours to last a lifetime — at home and in the classroom.

That weekly habit, over six years, produced a library of at least a thousand discs, whose thousand dollar investment proved Oscar Wilde‘s maxim about people who “know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” Because this collection was priceless.

And the day came when I expected to lose it all.

That day came because those Shanghai years fell victim to the international teacher’s wanderlust. Wanting a change of Experience, I’d resigned my post and sought employment in a new land. Fate offered Korea, among other possibilities, and I took it. But that turned out to mean, I learned, that I probably wouldn’t be able to take that collection with me. Anybody familiar with airport customs knows what I’m talking about. DVDs from the People’s Republic of the Middle Kingdom scream “contraband.”

So there I was passing through the gates into Life’s Next Chapter: The Korea Years, and I mean that “gates” literally: I was at the [name withheld to protect the guilty heavensent] airport’s arrival gate, sweating bullets, because I’d packed my Collection in my suitcases instead of shipping them with my furniture.  I’d been told the odds of getting them in were higher this way. Picture two large suitcases stuffed with more DVDs than clothes.

My first suitcase had already spewed forth from the baggage carousel without incident, so I was hopeful as I watched for the second one. That hope was shattered when it slid to me with, of all things, this strange yellow collar locked to the handle. Printed on it were instructions for me to proceed to a customs officer.

As my luggage cart approached the customs desk, the lock went all Rabbit Hole on me: it belted out this weird electronic alarm. People within 30 meters stared. I hear convicted pedophiles have to wear such things around their ankles, and that they do similar things when said convicts approach schools. It’s not a pleasant feeling. And it wasn’t an auspicious start for The Next Chapter, this entry as a branded criminal.

Hollywood really has a hold on airports worldwide, I thought. Freaking weird. What’s in it for foreign countries to protect the profit margins of Western corporations?

The customs officer wasn’t exactly warm as he told me to open my suitcase. He was no warmer when he saw the dozen or so DVD wallets stashed inside a folded shirt here, some folded pants there.

He asked me to take them out and show them to him.

“Most of them seem illegal,” he said.

“I don’t know. I bought them in Shanghai. I don’t read Chinese.”

Then came Fate’s Fist:

“You can’t take them in. I have to confiscate them and destroy them.”

I didn’t cry, but I did, just a little bit, whine. But sincerely:

“Aww. I use those in my classroom. You don’t know how many hours I put into building that collection.”

Then came Confucius‘ Grace:

“You’re a teacher?”

“Yes.”

“You’re going to teach in Korea?”

“Yes.”

“Can you prove it?”

I showed him the business card the school had sent me, and my contract, and this blessed man looked at the Laws of Commerce on his left shoulder, and the Laws of Confucius on his right, and had no apparent difficulty choosing which to serve:

“Go ahead. And good luck. Teaching is an important job. Thank you for doing it in Korea.”

I swear to Goodness, he actually said that. Thanks to Confucius, the Next Chapter had started off happily after all.

* * *

I’ve told this story many times, and most people don’t find it as interesting as I think they should. Because it brought home to me, concretely, what I’d only known in the academic abstract in my years teaching Confucianism in my Asian history classrooms — ironically enough, in China, the very homeland of Confucius. The lesson it brought home is this:

East Asia is blessed by its Confucianism. When the Han Dynasty, 2,000 years ago, put its political support behind the teachings of this Master, it unknowingly rooted in the Chinese spirit a devotion to education and scholarship — and that means to teachers, to students, and to schools.

It’s easy to criticize how East Asian countries educate, and what the word “education” means to them, but that’s beside the point here. Because it’s incomparably easier to criticize American civilization for its disdain for education. Its teacher-bashing vogue, its funds-cutting mania, and a million other details speak volumes on this point. The Chinese have a word for such a culture: barbarian.

Somebody said “A person ages into the face he deserves.” The same is true of a civilization. If America has aged into a face of illiteracy, innumeracy, historical, geographic, and scientific ignorance, it’s no mystery why.

So again, to those teachers who put their minds and hearts into managing and designing and sweating blood for the learning of a small army of young souls each year, and are thanked for it with scorn and bile — seriously, it’s not like that everywhere. There are other lands of opportunity in the world, and after a decade of teaching in China, in Korea, and now in Singapore, I can’t recommend the Confucian ones highly enough.

And with that, I’ll close with a few verses from the Confucian scriptures themselves, so remarkably sane and reasonable to this Westerner, and thus so beautifully civilized. From the Analects:

2:14. Confucius said, “The superior man is broadminded but not partisan; the inferior man is partisan but not broadminded.”

2:15. Confucius said, “He who learns but does not think is lost; he who thinks but does not learn is in danger.”

2:17. Confucius said, “Yu, shall I teach you [the way to acquire] knowledge? To say that you know when you do know and say that you do not know when you do not know — that is [the way to acquire] knowledge.”

And most germane, perhaps, to those Americans described by our ex-teacher in the opening quote, is this final Confucian verse:

8:13. Confucius said, “Have sincere faith and love learning. Be not afraid to die for pursuing the good Way. Do not enter a tottering state nor stay in a chaotic one.  When the Way prevails in the empire, then show yourself; when it does not prevail, then hide. When the Way prevails in your own state and you are poor and in a humble position, be ashamed of yourself. When the Way does not prevail in your state and you are wealthy and in an honorable position, be ashamed of yourself.”

–emphasis added, and for good reason: Teachers have “asked what they can do for their country,” and they do it. Daily. But they should have the good sense to also ask what their country is doing for them, patriotic martyrdom propaganda aside. If their country has reached a “tottering, chaotic” point at which it “loathes” them, then teachers do have choices.

One of those choices is Asia. America used to be a magnet for other countries’ brain-drain. Asia seems the better magnet now.

It is for me, anyhow.  I’m thankful that I teach in Asia — because Asia is thankful for it, too.

25 Comments

• At June 30, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Now THAT is an awesome little anecdote. I have filed it away for future reference!!!

  Re: the comment that prompted you to share the story here, I just wanted to point that there are plenty of "thought police" on the left AND on the right - I speak as someone who lost a teaching job in a department filled with political liberals who were, nevertheless, unable to cope with pedagogical innovation of any kind... free thinking in the classroom is a fright to anyone adamant about their own authority, left or right, it seems to me.

  :-)

• At June 30, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Laura,

  I'm totally with you on that one. Point well-taken. Now an invitation: give us the juicy details.

• At June 30, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Ha ha, well, here's a short version of the story - I can laugh about it now but at the time it was pretty traumatic.

  I had been hired fresh out of grad school (Berkeley PhD 1999) to be an assistant professor in the Classics dept. at Univ. of Oklahoma. Everybody was surprised when I got hired since I was the opposite of a traditional classicist in every way - my interest is in folklore, and I study fables, proverbs, jokes, riddles, etc.; I have about zero interest in classical authors except insofar as they, like all great literary masters, often incorporated folklore and traditional storytelling motifs into their literary work. I also studied Russian and Polish (lived in Poland for a while, taught Polish) and so I teach Latin in a way that is more like teaching a living language than the usual "translate-and-parse" approach which is the main mode of Latin teaching. Instead of reading super-hard classical authors, I prefer to use simple stories, fables, fairy tales, etc., things that are easy to read, short genres that teach some kind of moral or lesson which you can debate about, and which also lend themselves to being creatively rewritten (anybody can make up their own version of a fairy tale or fable, very fun).

  Sooooo… it was a complete disaster. After one year, when they found out what kind of Latin and Greek I was teaching and how I was teaching it, they took away all my language classes and only gave me literature-in-translation classes to teach - so, I allowed students to enroll in "group independent studies" with me, creating reading groups where we could read easy Latin and easy Greek together. Since I ended up with more students in my independent study groups than in the regular Latin classes, the faculty were furious and went to the Dean to get me fired for "fomenting a curriculum contrary to the classical tradition." He explained that they could not fire me for that (academic freedom??? hello????), but he did agree to let them take away my privilege to offer independent study courses (although he admitted I would be the only faculty member at the university who was denied that privilege). At that point, my only choice was to cave in, or sue, or quit. So I quit.

  Luckily, I ended up with a great job teaching folklore and mythology courses, online, in the General Education program at this same university (I am a geek, so that works for me; I love teaching online - my courses are at my mythfolklore.net). This means I do not have a department and do not answer to a department, and I have been free to develop the classes in a way that matches my goals and beliefs as a teacher. As an instructor on a year-to-year contract, I have zero job security and I am earning about half what a professor makes - but that is a small price to pay for FREEDOM. :-)

  Meanwhile, let me ask you a question: from the people I knew who did Chinese in graduate school, it is my impression that in the Chinese tradition, there is not this dreadful disconnect between proverbs and fables on the one hand, and literature on the other hand, as has happened in modern-day Classical studies (i.e. Latin and Greek Classics). Is that your experience also?

  It's crazy to me: even though the ancient Greeks and Romans collected their fables and proverbs with pride, and even though they were much beloved by Renaissance scholars, starting in the 19th and 20th centuries, the academic discipline of Classics purged itself of proverbs and fables. That's a sad thing in terms of understanding the cultural tradition and it also creates a practical problem for teaching the languages, too!

  It used to be that Aesop's fables were a core component of the basic Latin learner's curriculum, but no more. Students are condemned to read Vergil and Caesar and Cicero and other works far too hard for beginners, all because the fables have been cast out into the darkness. Alas.

• At June 30, 2010, mike whatley wrote:

  I'm a conservative and I don't "loathe" teachers. I do however withhold automatic praise and respect for teachers. (I also do same with those in the military).

  In the US, teachers and their culture are overrated. Yes, I still recall my 3rd grade teacher fondly, (Mrs Parman) and had the good fortune of having studied under an AAUP "Professor of the Year" among others.

  But K-12 instruction and "teachers" are full of mediocrity. Moreover our society no longer values education. (When upwards of 40% of urban HS students dropout/flunk out, your community does not respect the value of learning.) That failure is something worth "loathing". And teachers are an icon of that failure. Not solely responsible but visible participants in the demise.

  Still an interesting post. Thanks.

• At June 30, 2010, elaine! wrote:

  That story is amazing. I wish teachers got more respect here. Maybe then the problem teachers that a few commenters are pointing out would rise to meet the public's expectations.

• At June 30, 2010, » Land of Opportunity Sam Harrelson wrote:

  [...] post: Advice for Teachers Scorned: “‘Go ahead. And good luck. Teaching is an important job. Thank you for doing it in [...]

• At June 30, 2010, Come teach in Asia | Learning & Teaching wrote:

  [...] teach in Asia Clay Burell in a blog post about America’s disdain for teachers: Somebody said “A person ages into the face he [...]

• At June 30, 2010, Harold Jarche » Trends wrote:

  [...] Shifts Eastward: Clay Burell’s advice for teachers scorned: Teachers have “asked what they can do for their country,” and they [...]

• At July 1, 2010, Terry Elliott wrote:

  I am one who is very interested in what you are saying here. I have the same problem even among teachers when I do tech trainings. Most are appreciative, but others make one wonder. I told your DVD story to my wife and she said let's move.

• At July 1, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Terry,

  If you're serious, I wrote this post a while back about the interview process.

  This Google search will take you to recruitment agencies (I used ISS, and Search Associates is the other one I most often hear about -- disclaimer: you'll get mixed reviews of all such outfits, so I'm not recommending any particular one) to learn the ropes of registering for and planning to attend one or more recruitment fairs. Give yourself several months to get your ducks in order for the Winter fairs.

  Let me know if I can help in any way, and I'll try.

  C.

• At July 1, 2010, leighblackall wrote:

  Nice post. Especially the DVD story. Tagged it "resistcopyright". Thanks for writing it.

• At July 1, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks for stopping in, Leigh, and thanks for the tip on the tag. Worth exploring.

• At July 2, 2010, Chuck wrote:

  l love this posting, all postings for that matter, right to the last two lines. I really do. Always informative and entertaining.

  Thank you for the invite to teach in Asia, Clay. I would like to be thankful to Asia. I would love to accept that noble calling, literally, if only your host would extend the same courtesy to their descendents in form of ABC/CBC (American/Canadian Born Chinese) as to our lighter pigment brethrens and sisters. Sigh, many are called, white are chosen. Woe to the person who looks Asian but wants to go to Asia to teach. Yes, my lament is echoed ad nauseam on EFL message boards, but it doesn't seem to cause a ripple of improvement. Sorry if I sound like a whiny little boy. I am not looking for a soapbox to vent. After years of toiling for the profit motive I changed careers to fulfill my long held naïve boyscout ideals.

  This brings back to mind of a sign, "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed" that Bruce Lee split in half in one of his movies in a fit of anger -- full of symbolism. When I am looking to teach in Asia, all kinds of words and visions swimming in my head like “colonialism” and “imperialism” in the “concession areas”, but I can't say that. It's perpetrated by the Chinese themselves. I know, there are plenty of ABCs who are hired to teach English over there. There are more progressive administers granted, if progressive is the right word, I would venture to say they are in the minority. Wish me luck. I am continuing to apply to China and Korea.

  Whatley's post is another matter. I had to bite my tongue.

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Laura,

  What a SAD (Standard Academic Discourse) story. I'm not surprised, but I am glad you've got good falling-cat skills. Survivors are tops in my book.

  I can't speak with any expertise to your question about the Chinese attitude toward its folklore, fables, and proverbs. You ask the question precisely as I prep for a summer of diving into China's literary classics, which I know only superficially. But from what I've gathered so far, that divide doesn't exist -- and part of the reason for that is probably the essential difference between the West and China, when it comes to their ancient literature: Latin and (almost) Greek are dead languages, foreign languages, to Westerners, so Western classics are a strange sort of "ESL" for Westerners wanting to read them in the original.

  It's not the case for China. From the Oracle Bone inscriptions of 3,000 years ago to today, China's literary tradition is unbroken and in the same (though obviously evolving) language. Instead of being faced with having to learn a dead language at the beginner's level, their situation seems more akin to that of English speakers taking on Shakespeare or Chaucer. Not nearly as tall an order. Thus they have the advantage in being able to range across a fuller spectrum of their classics than Westerners do.

  And then there's the entirely different stylistic and rhetorical taste of Chinese literary expression. From what I've read (from Chinese scholars as well as Western ones), Chinese classics eschew the stilt-riding gravitas of the West in favor of an earthier and more poetic style even in their greatest of writers. And this makes me suspect the "high/low culture" dichotomy of our hrumph-hrumphing Western academics is less present among the Mandarins.

  More on that as I read away the summer as a mental time-traveling tourist in Chinese literature -- and write about it here.

  Funny coincidence: I've found your site and bookmarked it as a resource long before we connected.

  And it's totally cool that you've translated for Oxford Classics. You're interesting.

  All for now.

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  In the US, Americans and their culture are overrated and mediocre too, aren't they? From Congress to Wall Street to the pulpits of our churches to the board rooms of our corporations to the guns flooding our cities, the junk fattening our bodies, and the values fattening the spirits of our consumer-citizens.

  So let's withhold praise from all of them equally, or else damn them all equally with the same broad brush: logically, if all are mediocre because some are, then let's apply that attitude across the board.

  In other words, I don't get your logic.

  And I wonder what evidence you have for your claims.

  And seriously doubt you've known the teachers I've known -- some of whom were indeed mediocre, and some of whom were most emphatically not.

  Thanks for checking in anyway.

  But that's neither here nor there.

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Chuck,

  I hear you on all points, but have known a good number of "foreign Asians" with jobs in Asian international schools.

  Sounds like you want to teach ESL though, which is way gnarlier in this respect, I know, and totally unfair. But as you say, that's the native Asian prejudice. They want whitey. Saw it in Korea all the time.

  Singapore, by the way, seems different in its attitude toward Western Asians. Have you checked it out?

  As for the colonialism bit, I'm sensitive to it too, and rankle when I see some of my compatriots acting the dumbass in my adopted countries. But it's a global world, immigration cuts all ways now, and Asia is reasserting itself against the old imperialists in ways that don't seem like they'll stop any time soon.

  Anyway, I do wish you luck. Thanks for the kind words.

• At July 2, 2010, Chuck wrote:

  Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Laozhi. My other "teachable" is Business, which I find most schools over there are limited to Economics. Strangely, most of Canadian, Ontario schools anyway, throw Econ in the Social Science Dept mix bag. I do find teaching ESL more rewarding. Certainly, I would love to teach Business too, as you know the pay could be far more lucrative. So be it then, Business in Asia jt is then. Happy Independence Day. The Queen is visiting us now :-) Still July 1, Canada Day here. It seems I'm behind the times once again.

  Good luck in Korea. I just might you see you there if I have any luck, in YongIn anyway.

• At July 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Coffee's on me if our paths cross. (But I live in Singapore now, not Korea :) )

• At July 2, 2010, What China Can Teach Writing Teachers | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] fun little conversation I'm having with Laura in this comment thread includes her question about differences between Chinese literary types and Western [...]

• At July 3, 2010, Sue VanHattum wrote:

  I loved reading this, Clay. From recent reports, it sounds like Finland respects teachers and education also...

• At July 3, 2010, mike whatley wrote:

  Clay--- Teachers are not special as a group. Though they certainly think highly of themselves as you have demonstrated. It's hardly deserved in the US.

  I am the son of 2 Phd's the brother of a public school teacher and have taught at the Graduate level in University. (with student reviews among the highest in the department) While that is hardly "evidence", I'm comfortable with the assertion.

  The world beats a path to America's door. They drink in our vulgar culture. Emulate us. And want to live here. And the teachers here are very much a part of that low brow culture. As are the 75% of American youth unfit to serve in the military (obese/uneducated/criminal conduct/ mental health/ etc.--- and yes it matters) or the near 50% of urban youth who drop out/ flunk out of high school, or the fewer than 50% that matriculate/graduate from the widely acclaimed California community college system.

  Cheers from Pasadena

  !

• At July 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks for the response.

• At July 3, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Hi Clay, I think I benefited from the "life imitates art" thing: if my area of interest were tragedy, I'm sure all those events could have seemed very tragic indeed... but since I work on Aesop's fables, where the whole point is to learn from your mistakes and have a good laugh about them, well, that definitely helps to cultivate good falling-cat skills (ha ha, I like that one - our very fat cat is fond of climbing up high in the trees, very ambitious when it comes to birds, and always manages to land just fine).

  As for the split between folklore and literature in European traditions, argh, what a mess it has made, especially in the loss of proverbs (so often eschewed as cliches in a hyper-glamorized Romantic quest for "originality"). When I was teaching Latin at Berkeley to a very international group of students, the Asian students were fabulous with the proverbs (we would do 20 proverbs per day in Latin, every day) - they understood the metaphorical meaning of them instantly (while many of the American students were just baffled by the riddling metaphorical quality of many of the proverbs) and, even better, they were able to share with me the proverbs from their own countries that expressed the same idea but in a different way, using different natural metaphors to express the same psychological message, while the American students were often totally unfamiliar with the English-language equivalents to the Latin sayings. One of my favorites, for example, Latin Inter os et offam multa intervenire possunt, "between the mouth and the morsel many things can intervene" = "there's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip" met with stares of bafflement in a room of very bright undergraduates, who were stuck on the idea that it had something to do with being careful not to dribble when you drank something... they were stuck on the literal. The best proverbs are tiny little metaphorical poems - the medieval Latin ones even rhyme. Delightful stuff that used to be fully part of the cultural tradition, but hardly so anymore.

  I am doing a huge Aesop book this summer in Latin and have been persuaded that I should do an English translation after I finish the Latin version. I will send you a PDF copy; it's going to have 1000 fables in it - covering the whole range of medieval and Renaissance fables, too, unlike the Oxford book which had 600 fables, pretty much strictly Greek and Roman because that's what they wanted for that series. But the medieval ones especially are so much fun! :-)

• At July 10, 2010, Megan wrote:

  Clay,

  It's a nice story and an inspirational post, but I have to question the idea that your experience with the customs official is based on a universal Korean (or Asian) respect for teachers.

  I taught English for a year in a Korean elementary school; as a public school teacher here in the U.S., too, I was fascinated with comparisons between the two systems and had many, many conversations with the teachers at my school (all Korean except for me). They repeatedly told me that, while teaching is considered by many Koreans an enviable job because of the job security (once you're in, you have a job for life), teaching as a profession is not highly-regarded in modern Korean culture. Teachers are not treated as professionals with expertise, but expected to present a cookie-cutter curriculum. The public school system is widely considered useless and parents spend $1000s a year sending children to private after-school institutes. People looking for a prestigious career with social admiration do NOT choose teaching.

  Of course, I was only there a year and these opinions are from only one school's worth of teachers; maybe you got different opinions about teachers and public education from other Koreans while you were there. But I suspect that a Korean teacher transporting those same DVDs, with the same explanation, through airport customs would have gotten no such consideration. I think the customs official gave you that break because you are an ENGLISH-SPEAKING teacher, and as a nation (not every single individual), Korea is obsessed with mastering English and anxious to make a positive impression on foreigners.

  Again, I know my experience there was limited. But my friends who are Korean public school teachers would strenuously disagree with the idea that Korean culture uniformly respects and admires teachers.

• At July 10, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Megan,

  All your points are well-taken, and point to Korea's oddity as -- in my experience, anyway -- the most Americanized of East Asian nations. (The jaw-dropping density of Christian crosses per block in Seoul is one indicator, and the density of Western conspicuous consumption vanity brands adorning each Korean body another.)

  The hagwon mania, the overworked and scripted teachers, the corruption of families and students to get the grade and learning be damned -- all of these fall under the

  "It’s easy to criticize how East Asian countries educate, and what the word “education” means to them, but that’s beside the point here"

  caveat in the post. (The conservative Lee administration is only making things worse in all these respects.)

  As for the "prestige" factor, you're right: Koreans equate prestige and money (as do most other cultures everywhere today), and I didn't mean to imply that teaching was seen as an "elite" occupation. I did mean to suggest, though, that it's not disparaged with the vitriol so common in the US.

  And that customs officer? Maybe you're right, maybe not. He did initially move to destroy my collection, which doesn't suggest an initial impulse to treat me favorably to create a good impression of Korea. It's only when he found out I was a teacher that he changed his position.

  All good points, though. How much they apply to China, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan is a different question. I'm in Singapore now, an English-speaking but still largely Confucian country, and don't see or hear the teacher-bashing I see and read from American sources online.

  I think the bottom line is, again, the Confucianism. At the heart of that belief-system is that education is the most important thing in life, and family next. Money and wealth fall far, far below both in that values hierarchy (and are in fact seen as "vulgar" interests from Zhou times to Qing). There's no doubt that modern Western consumerism complicates Confucian values in Asia now, but it hasn't replaced it, and probably never will.

  Thanks for dropping in.

Related posts:

1. What China Can Teach Writing Teachers
2. A New Diigo Vision and Call for Advice: On Students Teaching China to the West
3. Chinese v. Western History: A Few “Mental Party” Highlights
4. Unschooly Students on Teachers Teaching Teachers