IT has been reported that some British ministers are exploring whether school children could benefit from classes in “mindfulness.”

According to Dr Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, a private school in the UK, making time for a “daily stillness period” would help youngsters learn to concentrate and help prevent mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.

Schools minister David Laws explained last month that “It’s about trying to impact on people’s motivations, their attitudes to life ...”

This Western appreciation of meditation, partly motivated by the desire to help students cope with mounting daily stress, is no doubt also a response to a widespread decline in religious sentiments.

Meditation has always been an important principle in Buddhism and Confucianism, for illumination and self-discipline.

In the first chapter of Confucius’ Analects, for instance, he spoke about the need of meiri sanxing wushen, or daily self-examination on three points: In doing things for others, have I been disloyal? In my interactions with friends, have I been untrustworthy? Have I practiced what I have preached?

These points, were they to be included in our primary school textbooks, as in the past, would help impressionable young minds establish a solid grounding in their outlook. Anyway, these precepts in the Analects have been presented as polished epigrams that are easily memorized.

The Xinmin Evening News reported on April 8 that at 8am, at Kangjian Foreign Languages Experimental School in Xuhui District, students are required to chant dizigui (a pupil’s precepts) at the beginning of each school day.

Dizigui is a set of rhymed three-character couplets summing up the gist of Confucian tenets particularly suited to rote-learning by younger children.

The dean of the school, following a trip to Taiwan, became convinced that before venturing out into the world children must be equipped with a solid grounding in traditional culture.

A moment of stillness and reflection is particularly necessary given the inundation of information, noise, and crass entertainment in modern urban life.

But a systematic remedy of the situation would entail basic reform and a systematic renovation of our textbooks.

Take my 11-year-old’s Chinese textbook as an example. Its pages are adorned with a miscellany of maxims churned out by Roman and Greek sages, modern inventors, scientists, and political figures. But there is no attempt whatsoever to inspire our children with a consistent set of core values.

Aims of education

This shortcoming can be partly explained by the fact that those entrusted to compile textbooks have themselves grown up without the advantage of a viable ideological orthodoxy.

The orthodoxy they have grown up with is now in need of constant updates and reassessment. Often the orthodoxy is simply the object of tacit scorn.

How do we expect these soulless compilers to produce a textbook that can help inculcate a particular set of principles and faith in our children?

This lack of a shared view and attitudes on life and culture is manifest in so many facets of our life that some leaders have been hinting lately about the need to do greater justice to our traditional values in our education.

This is of paramount importance if we consider the aim of education.

The first priority of any education is not about turning out pupils who excel at the vital national college entrance examination, or SAT, TOEFL, GRE, or PISA, but about equipping our students with a set of distinctly Chinese values and an outlook that can inspire them for the rest of their life.

In reality, teachers and parents are conspiring to cram every wakeful minute of the students’ day with test-friendly skills and knowledge.

I once asked a pal of my son why he was taking quite a few extra tests in his spare time, in addition to those routinely administered in his school.

“Just to make more money for them in the future,” he said sullenly. “Them” means his parents.

It is easy to see that as our students are busy imbibing those practical bits of knowledge and skills, they are also growing steadily estranged from the bigger issues of life.

Their failure to link their studies to larger purposes soon leads to students’ repugnance for the incessant demand for absorbing narrowly defined and fragmented knowledge.

There have been recent reports of a pilot plan to further divide gaokao (the college-entrance examination) into two types: skills-orientated and expertise-orientated tests. That would be a further betrayal of gaokao as a holistic measurement. Mindful meditation is particularly valuable today because our children — and their parents too — are constantly exposed to a cacophony of meaningless information.

It is increasingly easy to contaminate the minds of children, which are a tabula rasa, before any principles have any time to take root.

Given the failure of our schools — and society — to lay a solid foundation in Chinese culture and outlook, it’s not surprising that for a huge proportion of Chinese, the overriding ambition in this life is to stop being Chinese. Just think of the number of people who dream of making their children naturalized non-Chinese.

Remedies

To bring about a fundamental change requires effort in several directions.

In schools, our pupils should no longer be solely prized for their precocity for absorbing knowledge.

As observed by sages long ago, knowledge that is not guided by a moral compass and ethical scruples can be worse than useless.

It is dangerous, and destructive.

Students should be valued more for those traits and attributes that make them distinctly Chinese, for their native curiosity, their patriotism, and their readiness to serve their country.

Thus, our textbooks should be compiled by those Chinese intellectuals who are themselves so inspired by moral and ethical principles that they are convinced that our children cannot live properly without these fundamental truths.

Ye Kai is an editor of the literary journal “Harvest” and the father of a girl in middle school in Shanghai. He once provided his daughter with some helpful writing examples, but her teachers dismissed them as inferior against prevailing syllabic requirements. Outraged, the writer recently came up with his own Chinese textbook that strives not to kill students’ imagination.

But textbooks should do more than inspire the imagination.

No countries with a history as splendid as China can long afford its primary education to degenerate into a workshop turning out specialists.

A holistic and principled world view — or ideological guidelines — must come to the fore.

When China’s economic reforms were launched decades ago, ideological debates were dismissed as meddling and distracting from the central task of achieving economic prosperity.

Shedding ideological differences has been a prime mover for the subsequent economic takeoff. In hindsight today, we are probably in a better position to assess the cost of that prosperity.