An email to a friend - to chat about education

I was lucky (or more precisely, unlucky) to have seen a pair of bound feet, which belonged to my grandmother who has long gone. In my vivid memory she is still always in her eighties, sitting on a wooden stool undoing her binding strips, washing her terrifying deformed feet in a basin.

It was quite to my greatest surprise that a young medical student, whom I met with in Guangzhou just a little more than a year ago, told me that his grandmother in her nineties was among the last living victims of foot-binding! That means this old lady's feet began to be bound long after Xinhai Revolution.

With profound ignorance, this infamous sexual fetishism of an artificially inflicted deformity had prevailed for more than a thousand years!

When it comes to Chinese alchemy, with rampant ignorance, other than sending many to immortality, it did not evolve into chemistry as it happened in the Western world.

Only well developed education can remedy many, if not all, of the defective characteristics and behaviours of a people, especially one of an ancient civilization with a huge population, several thousand years of continuous history, deeply rooted traditions, and primal superstitions.

Poor education is the root of collective ignorance. Collective ignorance begets rampant unjustness and evil. Rampant unjustness and evil obstruct education improvement and reform. And this is a deadly vicious spiral many backward nations are suffering from.

Only when it happens that there are adequate selfless, righteous and intelligent conscious reformers inside the education system, nurturing more and more selfless, righteous and intelligent young people, that this vicious spiral can be broken. Only when this kind of young people make up a significant part of a population that the same could enjoy a just and fair society with a well received governing mechanism.

Education is the only key to civilization evolution, retaining the good traits, eliminating the bad ones.

China had known little about education when Western colonialism invaded the aged and sick Qing Empire. Whilst education had developed fast in the Western world synchronizing the course of Christianity evolution, China was content with its rotten imperial feudal bureaucratic examination system that had buried the intelligence and creativity of the most literate along history.

Then coming with colonialism were the Western missionaries. They came to the Middle Empire with the Good Book and they established schools. And this was the real beginning of education in China. By then the invading Great Britain's oldest university had already had a history of 7 centuries.