Zhu Xi’s commentaries became the exam syllabus a century after he died. Did that betray his idea of learning?
Its coordinates: 6.3 Philosophy of Education
Every year I teach the Four Books course to senior high students in Taipei, and every year I watch them memorise Zhu Xi's arrangement of the classics for a test.
The history is a little painful. Zhu Xi grouped the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean together and wrote commentaries on them. In 1313, more than a century after his death, those commentaries became the standard for the imperial civil examinations, and they stayed the standard until the examinations were abolished in 1905.
Yet Zhu Xi himself was a sharp critic of examination study. He liked to quote the line in the Analects that the learners of old studied for their own sake, while those of today study for the sake of others. His advice on reading is the opposite of cramming: read slowly, reread until the text is familiar, and test it against your own conduct.
So I am teaching the most famous critic of exam learning as exam material.
Some questions for discussion:
- Does putting a text on an exam syllabus necessarily change how it is read, or only how lazy readers read it?
- Wang Yangming later attacked the way Zhu Xi's teaching had hardened into recitation. Was he attacking Zhu Xi, or what the examination system had made of him?
- Is there a way to examine "learning for oneself" at all?