Teachers and students
Seven texts on the oldest arrangement in learning, one person handing what they know to another: a bell that rings as hard as it is struck, a student sent home twice to think, a teacher who will not answer, a lecture on a piece of chalk, and a poet’s rule for learning from everyone.
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Step 1: 禮記·學記 The Record of Learning (from the Book of Rites)
玉不琢，不成器。人不學，不知道。Jade that is not carved does not become a vessel; a person who does not learn does not know the Way.
Often called the earliest essay wholly about education, the Record says that teaching and learning help each other grow, that a good teacher opens the way without walking the student to its end, and that a good answer rings like a bell, as loudly as it is struck; Xunzi expects the student to end up bluer than the indigo.
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Step 2: 荀子·勸學 Xunzi: An Exhortation to Learning
不積跬步，無以至千里；不積小流，無以成江海。Without piling up single steps, there is no way to reach a thousand miles. Without piling up little streams, there is no way to make a river or a sea.
Blue comes from the indigo plant and is bluer, ice from water and is colder: Xunzi expects students to go further than their teachers if they keep at it like the earthworm, which reaches the deep springs with only a single mind; Han Yu draws the conclusion about who may teach whom.
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Step 3: 師說 On Teachers
聞道有先後，術業有專攻，如是而已。Some hear the Way sooner and some later; each art and craft has its specialists. That is all there is to it.
Written for a seventeen-year-old, Han Yu’s short essay says that the Way, not age or rank, decides who teaches, so a disciple need not be lesser than his teacher; in the Gnomon of the Zhou, a teacher refuses to hand over the answer.
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Step 4: 周髀算經·卷上（選） The Gnomon of the Zhou: Shang Gao and Chen Zi
故折矩，以為句廣三，股修四，徑隅五。So bend a carpenter’s square, making the base three across and the upright four long; then the diagonal between the corners is five.
Rong Fang goes home twice to think and twice comes back without the answer, and Chen Zi tells him that understanding means carrying one case across to many before he finally says, ‘Sit down again, and I will tell you’; Lu Xun’s old teacher would not answer at all.
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Step 5: 從百草園到三味書屋 From the Hundred-Plant Garden to the Three-Flavour Study
Ade，我的蟋蟀們！Ade，我的覆盆子們和木蓮們！Ade, my crickets! Ade, my raspberries and climbing figs!
In the garden a farmer teaches Lu Xun to trap birds and tells him he is too impatient, and at the strictest school in town a question about a strange insect gets only ‘I don’t know!’; Huxley, lecturing to working men, answers with evidence they can check for themselves.
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Step 6: On a Piece of Chalk
A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk.
Huxley holds up the bit of chalk every carpenter carries in his pocket and teaches a hall of listeners to read in it, ‘with your own eyes’, an ocean where England now stands, then says that an hour of thought has made the chalk shine; Du Fu ends the trail with the method under all of these.
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Step 7: 戲爲六絕句 Six Quatrains Written in Jest
爾曹身與名俱滅，不廢江河萬古流。You and your names will both perish, / but the rivers will not stop flowing for ten thousand ages.
Learn from teacher after teacher, and that habit becomes your teacher: the last line of Du Fu’s six quatrains is the shortest account I know of how anyone is taught, and it is the one I would leave at the end.