Yesterday I read two pieces where the authors talked big about promoting Chinese culture combined with ancient Chinese civilization, recently so boosted by the Chinese leaders.
One of the authors started with this, "When I was a graduate student, my advisor told me that, don't write if you don't have something original to say ... Otherwise, you contribute nothing valuable with your writing." Sadly to say, he produced a super long one full of empty words, yielding nothing substantial.
Talking of civilization only brought to my mind a very uncivilized murder case in Handan, China, where a teenager boy was brutally murdered by three of his classmates. Perhaps civilization needs to be restored because of its severe shortage in China now.
I remember many years ago reading about moral education in Japan. It is an integral of Japan’s educational system, with the goal of “cultivating student’s morality, including moral mentality, judgment, engagement, and attitude” through all the educational activities in school, including orderliness, mindfulness, hard work, fairness, and harmony.
It would be more down to earth and sensible if people talked about teaching morality at a young age, instead of throwing empty pompous terms like ancient wisdom and civilization.
For the health of a society, it is way more important for little kids to learn morality than to learn knowledge. A kid got the whole life to learn skills but once he turns bad morally, it will take his whole life to unlearn the bad morality.
A famous Chinese poem: 随风潜入夜，润物细无声 (Suí fēng qiánrù yè, rùn wù xì wú shēng), "quietly the rain drops with the wind at night, moistening everything without a sound." Like spring rain that moistens everything quietly, the gentle teaching nourishes and enriches children's hearts.