Chapter 62: The New Education

“We can’t just lump the adults and children together, can we?”

“We can divide them into two groups, a day class and a night class,” Du Wen proposed her plan. “Children during the day, and adults at night.”

“That won’t work,” Wang Luobin shook his head repeatedly. “You haven’t lived in the countryside—children are also half a labor force in the countryside. If they all go to school during the day, the villagers will definitely not agree.”

Du Wen thought about it and agreed. In comparison, she was more interested in the adult night school. “Then let’s have half-day classes, and focus on the night school…”

“Even more ridiculous.” Before Wang Luobin could speak, Chen Haiyang shook his head vigorously. “I have relatives who were sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It was fashionable to run night schools back then, but they were all suspended during the busy farming season. Farmers have high labor intensity. After a full day’s work, they need to rest. Who would come to your night school?”

“That’s right,” Wang Luobin nodded in agreement. “And before they realize the benefits of being educated, it’s very difficult to attract them to study.”

Seeing that they all objected, Du Wen got a little anxious. “So we’re not going to do it?”

“We’ll do it. Let’s start a training class first. We’ll have some elite education too,” Xi Yazhou said half-jokingly.

The so-called elite education Xi Yazhou mentioned was actually a cadre training class. This kind of temporary short-term training class was often used in local work in the past: to cultivate activists who were close to the organization. Although their goals were different, through training, their consciousness was raised, their sense of organization and discipline was strengthened, and they learned methods of work, eventually becoming the transmission gears that drove the masses in countless grassroots organizations.

Of course, this was easier said than done. Opening up a new area was the most difficult part, especially in a fairly closed and conservative traditional rural society. The crisis facing the saltworks gave the transmigrators an excellent opportunity to penetrate the local society. From this point of view, Landlord Gou was their benefactor.

So who were the activists? There were the Tan father and son, the village chief’s daughter could be counted as one, and there were also some young people who were on good terms with Tan Chengqing. It was naturally inconvenient for a single girl to attend classes with a group of men at night, so at the beginning, this night school was only for men.

Wang Luobin, however, was not in a hurry to formally gather everyone. He first found Tan Guihuang and said he wanted to start a school for the children to teach them how to read and use the abacus. Tan Guihuang looked troubled, saying that the children in the village usually had to help with farm work, and their parents would probably not agree to let them go to school. Wang Luobin promised that classes would only be for half a day and would not interfere with farm work. Only then did Tan Guihuang reluctantly agree to talk to the villagers. To be on the safe side, Wang Luobin also sent Zhang Xingjiao to persuade them. Xi Yazhou had originally wanted to promise that all children who came to study would be provided with free lunch, but this was too much of a strain on their dwindling food reserves.

In the end, quite a few children came. Although most people felt that it was useless for their children to study, being able to read some characters and do some accounting was not a bad thing for a farming family. Besides, school was only for half a day and did not affect the work in the fields.

The school’s classes were held every afternoon for four hours, from 12:00 to 4:00. However, like most ancient residents, the salt workers had little concept of exact time. To establish this concept, an electric loudspeaker was installed in the Ge Hong Temple camp, which automatically broadcasted once every hour: “The time is now X o’clock, Lingao time.” Xi Yazhou knew that it was more useful to instill the concept of hours and minutes in this subtle way than to try to drill it into them.

The members of the work team invested a great deal of enthusiasm in this education plan. The curriculum was designed to be simple and practical. The main content at this stage was literacy and calculation.

To read general Chinese, one needs to master at least 500 basic characters, so Wang Luobin’s literacy plan was based on 500 basic characters. For this school, he made a special trip back to Bairen City and found two suitable textbooks from the computer database of the intelligence and data group: the 1959 edition of “Rural Literacy Textbook” and the 1971 edition of “Practical Mathematics for Rural Areas.” Both were textbooks specially compiled for rural education in those years, easy to understand and highly targeted. In particular, “Practical Mathematics for Rural Areas” not only had simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, but also practical content such as calculating yield per mu, volume calculation, and simple geometric measurement.

However, these two textbooks contained many phrases with strong contemporary overtones, such as the frequent appearance of “Great Leader Chairman Mao” and “in the great proletarian revolution…” Wang Luobin spent the night copying and rewriting them, then found Zhou Dongtian in the printing room and asked him to print 30 sets.

“30 sets?” Zhou Dongtian had also become a bit stingy these days—his paper stock had not been replenished. And these were two books, not a few pages of documents or a small newspaper.

“Yes, 30 sets, elementary textbooks. The sooner the better!”

Zhou Dongtian looked at the draft. Seeing that there were many illustrations, he hesitated. The workload for just the drawing would be considerable. But he still promised to produce the finished product as soon as possible.

However, in the textbook, Wang Luobin also added the teaching content of Hanyu Pinyin from elementary school Chinese. Wang Luobin had always believed that simplified characters and Hanyu Pinyin were the two magic weapons that enabled New China to popularize basic education.

He showed this set of textbooks to Zhang Xingjiao, and as expected, it was opposed by the middle-aged tongsheng. In Zhang’s view, these “popular characters” were not shocking, but as an educator, he opposed including “popular characters” in the textbooks. “It’s misleading the students,” he commented.

Wang Luobin said that this was mainly to simplify education and facilitate children’s reading and writing. Besides, the purpose of educating these children was not for them to take the imperial examinations or write poetry. It was enough for them to be able to write their names, write letters, and read some simple books.

But Zhang Xingjiao still felt it was awkward. In fact, he recognized almost all of these simplified characters. In his view, simplified characters could only be used, not be the standard. “The students you teach like this will be laughed at. The articles they write will be full of popular characters. Even if others don’t laugh, we will be ashamed to be their teachers.” As he spoke, he became emotional, as if he was ready to defend traditional characters to the death.

Zhang Xingjiao was also not impressed with the literacy textbook. In his opinion, the Thousand Character Classic and the Hundred Family Surnames were sufficient for children’s enlightenment education. The newly compiled book was superfluous. Seeing the beautifully printed literacy textbook, he exclaimed what a pity it was—and criticized many of the phrases and sentence patterns in the textbook as “ungrammatical.”

After enduring more than an hour of Zhang Xingjiao’s nitpicking, Wang Luobin proposed a fair competition: the two of them would each lead a class and see who could learn to read and write first. This stunned Zhang Xingjiao. He carefully looked at the literacy textbook again and said after a long while, “Your set of simplified characters is easy to recognize and write. Naturally, you will have the advantage…”

“That’s right. Our set of simplified characters has the advantage of being easy to learn and remember. The people don’t need profound knowledge; literacy is just for the convenience of life,” Wang Luobin explained patiently. Zhang Xingjiao was the first intellectual they had come into close contact with, and his attitude could roughly show what the intellectuals of the Ming Dynasty thought of the transmigrators’ culture.

After some persuasion, Wang Luobin took a step back and proposed to teach both simplified and traditional characters at the same time. Zhang Xingjiao was still not very willing, but for these overseas people to be able to run a school for poor children was already commendable. Besides, he was also working for them and couldn’t make things too stiff. Thinking of this, he finally agreed to assist Wang Luobin’s teaching. The scholars of ancient times still had some sense of responsibility to educate the common people, unlike the modern ones who became teachers for the stable salary and winter and summer vacations.

But for Wang Luobin, he was not satisfied. He had not been able to truly convince a minor intellectual of the Ming Dynasty to accept his arguments.

To avoid interference, in the initial stage, he started teaching with the Pinyin alphabet, teaching the children the pronunciation of the Pinyin letters. Once they learned Pinyin, they would also master the correct pronunciation of Mandarin. After all, the transmigrators were going to use Mandarin for education. Children’s language learning ability is far superior to that of adults, so teaching them was twice as effective with half the effort.

In Zhang Xingjiao’s view, Wang Luobin’s teaching method was completely incredible. For a Confucian scholar like Zhang Xingjiao, the enlightenment education he had received since ancient times was all about rote learning. When students entered school, they started by reading the Three Character Classic, the Thousand Character Classic, the Hundred Family Surnames, and the Poems for Prodigies. To learn to write, they would trace over red characters with a brush. The teacher basically didn’t explain anything, just led the children to read a passage every day and had them recite it repeatedly. This kind of teaching generally continued until they finished the Four Books. A typical student could recite the Four Books backwards and forwards and would recognize almost all the characters.

But Wang Luobin’s class started with something he didn’t understand at all, a bunch of squiggly things that looked like talismans. What a, o, e, yi… He also made many beautiful cards: the letter ‘e’ was a goose, which very intuitively taught the sound. The students memorized these things as if they were singing a song, and only then did they use these characters to mark the pronunciation of each word. Seeing this use, Zhang Xingjiao finally understood. It turned out that the Pinyin alphabet that Chief Wang was always talking about was used for phonetic notation, similar to the fanqie method that scholars learned.

However, Zhang Xingjiao also had to admit that after learning this set of “Pinyin alphabet,” recognizing new characters became much faster. Some of the smarter children could even recognize characters on their own based on the Pinyin annotations in the textbook. This quick method greatly interested him, and he repeatedly asked Wang Luobin which great Confucian scholar had come up with it. Wang Luobin said that this set of Pinyin and simplified characters was the result of the lifelong painstaking research of a great overseas scholar named “Wen Kaiwei” (a pun on the Language Reform Committee)—the purpose was to enable all Chinese people under the heavens to be able to read and write. Such a grand ideal filled Zhang Xingjiao with awe.