en years ago. A reported
school attendance of less than one million (780,325 to be exact) in a
population of 400,000,000 does not look encouraging, but when we
compare these figures with the statistics of attendance a few years
ago there is unmistakable evidence of progress. In the metropolitan
province of Chihli, for example, I find that there are now more
teachers in government schools than there were pupils six years ago,
and the total attendance has grown from 8000 to 214,637!

Even if China had not established a single additional school, however,
or increased the school attendance by even a percentage fraction, her
educational progress these last ten years would yet be monumental. For
as different as the East is from the West, so different, in literal
fact, are her educational ideals at the present time as compared with
her educational ideals a decade ago. At one fell blow (by the Edict of
1905) the old exclusively classical and literary system of education
was swept away, made sacred though it was by the traditions of
unnumbered centuries. Unfortunately the work of putting the new
policies into effect was entrusted to the slow and bungling hands of
the old literati; but this was a necessary stroke of policy, for
without their support the new movement would have been hopelessly
balked.

The old education taught nothing of science, nothing of history or
geography outside of China, nothing of mathematics in its higher
branches. Its main object was to enable the scholar to write a learned
essay or a faultless poem, its main use to enable him by these means
to get office. Under the old system the Chinese boy learned a thousand
characters before he learned their meaning; after this he took up a
book {110} containing a list of all the surnames in the empire, and the
"Trimetrical Classics," consisting of proverbs and historical
statements with each sentence in three characters. Now he is taught in
much the same way as the Western boy. The old training developed the
powers of memory; the new training the powers of reasoning. The old
education enabled the pupil to frame exquisite sentences; the new
gives him a working knowledge of the world. The old looked inward to
China and backward to her past; the new looks outward to other
countries and forward to China's future. The old was meant to develop
a few scholarly officials; the new, to develop many useful citizens.
"Even our students who go abroad," as a Peking official sa