From John Macgowan, Sidelights on Chinese Life, 1907 p. 44, 50
THERE is no nation that is fonder of children than the Chinese. They have a perfect passion for them, and it is very rarely that a family can be found without one or more of them in it. If there are none born into it, arrangements are made to supply that deficiency by buying some for the Chinese seem to have a perfect dread of a childless home. If a man has the means, he will buy several sons, who are treated as though they were his own, and, when they grow up, they will inherit his property, and have all the privileges that are given to those that were born in the family….
The early years of a child seem on the whole to be happy ones. In the swarms of children that one sees almost anywhere, one gets the impression that on the whole they thoroughly enjoy themselves. They run about and romp and dance and gambol very much as a similar number of English children would do on the village green, or in the streets and lanes of a home city.
The Chinese are far from being a gloomy race of people. Their hearts are full of fun and vigorous life, and this is seen in the sturdy urchins that race about with each other and that fill the air with their merry sounds of childish laughter.
With very young children this is all the more remarkable since so little is provided for their amusement. Such things as pictures or story-books or toys in the large and profuse sense with which our nurseries are supplied in England, do not exist in this land. Childhood is left very much to its own resources to find out the means of passing the time pleasantly. It is pathetic to watch how, with the fewest and simplest materials, the little ones will pass the day, with apparently perfect contentment. The method most popular, because it involves no expense, is the making of mud pies, and the building of miniature houses with broken pieces of tiles that can be picked up from the streets.
EDUCATION
Macgowan, Sidelights on Chinese Life, 1907, pp. 56, 57
At about eight preparations are made for the lad to go to school. Terms are made with the school-master of the nearest school, a certain number of books splashed and dotted over with mysterious-looking hieroglyphics are bought, and one morning at early dawn, just as the pale grey light begins to colour the landscape, the little fellow finds his way along the silent road to the school-house. Here for six or seven years he will spend the best part of his days in the study of books that contain the ideals of the nation.
They are the driest of dry books, and were really written for scholarly men, and for men of thought, whose thinking powers were considerably developed. There is not a single story in their pages. No child or woman's voice is heard from beginning to end, and no laughter, and no sob of pain, or any touch of the finer qualities of the human heart.
The boy begins at eight not with "Jack and Jill," or the “House that Jack built," or with any nursery rhyme that would appeal to a child's imagination, but with the solemn statements on high ethical questions that some of the greatest thinkers and teachers of China have produced. Some idea of the style of the books that these little urchins have to grind at, may be gathered from the fact that the first book that is put into the hands of that eight-year-old scholar is called The Three Words Classic, from the fact that each sentence is made up of three words rhythmically set. It is about as crabbed and as profound a piece of writing as exists in the whole language. Its first sentence makes a dogmatic statement which has not been generally accepted in China, viz. "Man by nature is originally good." Just imagine a boy of ten, accustomed till to-day to run as wild as a climbing plant, that creeps up trees, or over ruined walls, or down the side of a precipice, brought face to face with a statement like this, instead of the conventional one, " My dog," or "'His cat," that confronts the English lad as he first enters the domain of learning.
Try and conceive the wear and tear upon a child's spirit in having for years to shout and scream out at the top of his voice, as Chinese scholars do, such profound teaching as the above, and you will then have caught a glimpse of the steep and precipitous way along which these eight-year scholars have to travel in their pursuit after knowledge. A more dreary system of education, where imagination and humour, and poetry and romance, and all the finer emotions of the soul are rigorously excluded, it would be impossible to conceive than that which every Chinese scholar has to go through in every school throughout the Empire to-day.
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