SHANGHAI Daily reported on Monday about a school in Hangzhou that is dedicated to tutoring young students in ancient Chinese classics.

The picture of two students clad in antiquated traditional Chinese dress, beaming as they bent over copies of "Dizi Gui" ("Precepts for Pupils") might be too dramatic and theatrical to become a reality, but the school does serve some useful purpose.

There is at least a semblance of addressing a grave concern disturbing an increasing number of parents, teachers, and the society at large: Why do we send our children to school?

Each morning when I drag my eight-year-old son to that institution, I am troubled by a sense of guilt.

As a first grader, he can spell the English words for many kinds of fruits, clothes, animals, even "oink" and "quack" (how many of his American counterparts are capable of the feat?), but his class scores are less than mediocre.

In a Chinese exercise this week, he was required to read a passage setting out the differences between a rooster and a hen, and then asked: Which one do you like?

My son's answer: I like playing chess. The correct answer is: I like the hen, which is not as ostentatious as a rooster, but knows how to lay eggs.

Can we possibly hope to inspire our sons with clucking hens, or quacking English ducks?

Doesn't it make more sense for them to memorize the "Dizi Gui"? Handed down from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the precepts contain in rhymed couplets the essence of the outlook and attitudes that ought to set us apart as Chinese.

They begin with injunctions like these:

"Be filial to your parents and respectful to all of your elders, be trustworthy, cautious and kind, draw near to those who are good and love all equally - and when you still have time to spare, devote it to learning."

These simple ideas sum up the Confucian concept of a universal governance that starts with cultivation of individual virtues first in the family context, then extrapolates them to the society at large, and ultimately applies them to conduct of state affairs.

Today's highly competitive school system values narrow specialization and devalues other attainments. But anyone who absorbs these precepts stands to gain something.

But some specialists say these principles are not only outmoded but "poisonous."

Peng Fuchun recently criticized the practice of making children memorize "Dizi Gui" as "poisoning the soul of young people."

Peng has quite a few fancy titles: deputy to the National People's Congress, a returned PhD holder from Germany, and director of the Aesthetics Institute of Wuhan University.

Baseless charge

He explained that in tutoring students in classics a distinction should be made between the "essence and the dross," with a view to adapting them to modern civic virtues centered on science and democracy.

Zhang Yaojie, who considers himself "a scholar in history," supports Peng's view by commenting in the Oriental Morning Post on March 10 that Peng's idea of civic virtue is "human-centered humanism cherished by the human race in the age of globalization."

Then Zhang begins to toss around such terms as freedom, democracy, contracts, trade, justice, rights, modern state, equality, and so on.

Chinese perception of human limitations in an awe-inspiring universe has sustained the Chinese people for thousands of years, while two decades of globalization have already degraded our spiritual and physical world in ways that no responsible citizens can pretend to be ignorant of.

But scholars Peng and Zhang seem to be incapable of understanding these hidden fractures, because in the past our education system has turned a horde of academics who are essentially neither Chinese nor Western in their outlook.

They are very different from some well-known Chinese scholars advocating wholesale Westernization during the May Fourth Movement in 1919.

Those proponents were at least well-read in Chinese classics, and it is doubtful if they would have remained so radical had they known the number of wars waged in the name of democracy and abetted by science

By comparison, the radical views of Peng and Zhang can only be explained by ignorance, matched only by their audacity. They exemplify, if anything, the total failure of our education system.

The failure was also demonstrated by a Shanghai overseas student who sank his knife into her mother on March 31, enraged that she failed to pay his tuition on time.

The youth had studied in Japan for five years, at an annual cost of 300,000 (US$46,000) to 400,000 yuan.

The mother was rushed to intensive care, and no sooner had her condition stabilized than she began to exculpate her son.

The mother's mistake lies in her readiness to buy her son an expensive overseas education without first making him memorize a few lines of "Dizi Gui."

Responsible educators, East and West, long ago deplored that universities have degenerated into little more than job-training establishments.

That is a mockery of the original mission of universities.

The earliest universities were developed under the aegis of the Western church or monasteries to promote learning so as to glorify an omniscient God.

Aim of education

Overspecialization later led to universities diverging from their primary mission, as independent inquiry comes into its own.

Still, some prestigious ancient campuses in the West are still dominated by the church.

When Western-style university centered on the sciences ("to know") were transplanted to China, although the church was conspicuously absent, the wenmiao (the Confucian temple) was still not far from the students' mind. Some suggest we Chinese do not have religious beliefs.

As a matter of fact, we have very strong belief. That belief has kept us in place in the universe since our civilization began.

"Dizi Gui" can help initiate our children into that all-transcending belief.

A traditional Chinese scholar may have many merits, but those of first importance are whether he has a proper dose of ren (benevolence), yi (justice), and li (propriety), as emphasized in the "Dizi Gui."

Thus, when a scholar pursues his studies, the question of "why" necessarily take precedence over the question of "how."

A scholar imbued with these higher purposes will think twice before prostituting his talents into, say, the development of weapons of mass destruction.

I confess a person sticking to "Dizi Gui" today would appears ludicrous except on a stage, but probably it says more about what has goes awry with our society, than what's wrong with the precepts.