RE: [xmca] Purposes and processes of education

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Interestingly, Wang Anshi's main reform was to bring in the infamous "baguwen", or "eight-legged essay", which was one of the main targets of Robert Kaplan's theory of "Contrastive Rhetoric", in which he (infamously) tried to show that different languages have different rhetorical patterns and only the English one is truly linear (Russian and French are zig-zag, if I remember correctly, and Arabs write in arabesques, but Chinese is a hopeless, endless spiral around the point).
 
Wang Anshi's "eight legged essay" was an elaborate essay type, where two paragraphs were used to open, several more (stylized) paragraphs used to elaborate and develop, and then a conclusion was used to "wrap up" all loose ends. I have seen a few examples; it is at once more stylized and more conducive to creativity than the kind of five-paragraph essays that are the staple of high school composition classes today, not to mention the endless shopping lists created by PPT presentations. 
 
Chen Duxiu, one of the founders of Chinese Marxism, but also one of the founders of May Fourth Literature, the first really modern literature in Chinese history, condemned the "eight legged essay" as "dead" and it was abolished, along with the Civil Service exam, with the fall of the Qing Dynasty. So it was pretty silly for Kaplan to claim that his Chinese students in California in the sixties were somehow still under its spell.
 
Mohan and Lo later demonstrated that what Kaplan thought was interference from the "eight legged essay" was mostly the natural process of finding out what you mean by meaning it, complicated somewhat by the word searches that come with writing in a second language. 
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Sun, 1/17/10, Tony Whitson <twhitson@UDel.Edu> wrote:


From: Tony Whitson <twhitson@UDel.Edu>
Subject: RE: [xmca] Purposes and processes of education
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Sunday, January 17, 2010, 7:07 PM


The best source I know of in English on the Chinese examination system is Elman's "A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China." Although the book's primary focus begins with the Mongol Dynasty (Marco Polo's time), it has chapters on the earlier background, as well as extensive bibliographic and reference information:

In this multidimensional analysis, Benjamin A. Elman uses over a thousand newly available examination records from the Yuan, Ming, and Ch'ing dynasties, 1315-1904, to explore the social, political, and cultural dimensions of the civil examination system, one of the most important institutions in Chinese history. For over five hundred years, most important positions within the dynastic government were filled through these difficult examinations, and every other year some one to two million people from all levels of society attempted them. Covering the late imperial system from its inception to its demise, Elman revises our previous understanding of how the system actually worked, including its political and cultural machinery, the unforeseen consequences when it was unceremoniously scrapped by modernist reformers, and its long-term historical legacy. He argues that the Ming-Ch'ing civil examinations from 1370 to 1904 represented a substantial break with
 T'ang-Sung dynasty literary examinations from 650 to 1250. Late imperial examinations also made "Tao Learning," Neo- Confucian learning, the dynastic orthodoxy in official life and in literati culture. The intersections between elite social life, popular culture, and religion that are also considered reveal the full scope of the examination process throughout the late empire.

On Sun, 17 Jan 2010, David Kellogg wrote:

> Mike:
>  
> Sorry--I really don't know very much about it. I know Wang Anshi as a poet and a prime minister, and I also know that the Han brought in the first real civil service exams, just after the fall of the Qin (around 300 BC). So the exams were NOT several thousand years old.
>  
> I think that Western accounts of civil service exams alway tend to emphasize how uncreative etc. they were. But every actual exam question I've seen suggests that they were most of  the type:
>  
> Bu Xiao You San
> Wu Hou Wei Da
>  
> There are three types of unfiliality.
> Not having children is the worst.
> (Discuss.)
>  
> Now, you can see that this is not a cloze exercise; it involves enormous creativity and interpretation (construct validity, that is, the quesition of whether this kind of creativity and interpretation has any role whatsoever in discriminating competent future officials from the other sort, is an entirely different matter).
>  
> How could it have been ANY other way? A country the size of China, with literally tens of thousands of test takers, could not possibly use a cloze test or a multiple choice test or ANY test based on memorization because there would simply be too many successful test takers and the test would lose its discrimination as well as its power to shape the civil service according to the dominant ideology (e.g. the "reform" ideology of Wang Anshi or the more conservative Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi).
>  
> There is also a healthy tradition of RESISTANCE to examination culture, including the Chinese classic "Rulin Waishi" ("How to Pass the Civil Service Examination", a satirical novel on the educational system) and "Wei Cheng" (a realist novel about foreign students in early modern China who come back to China with bought Ph.Ds and compare their marriages and their careers to a besieged city--everybody outside wants to get in and everybody inside wants to get out).
>  
> Sometimes this iconoclasm is reflected in the exam itself in various ways. During the cultural revolution, a examinee who handed in a blank paper became a national hero of the know-nothing Red Guards (and even, Trofim Lysenko style, became a college professor).
>  
> A couple of years ago, there was a "trick" question on the College Entrance exam in China which consisted of a story problem in which a college student was confronted with an apparently simple geometry problem to which the answer could be either a point OR a line OR a plane OR a space (e.g. describe the city of Xi'an as a geometrical form).
>  
> Of course, he answered all of the above. The essay question was to explain how each of his answers could be seen as correct. And THAT is one very good reason why the college entrance exam takes three days in China and only one day in Korea.
>  
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>  
>  
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Tony Whitson
UD School of Education
NEWARK  DE  19716

twhitson@udel.edu
_______________________________

"those who fail to reread
are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
                  -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
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