Reciting before understanding.
Children chant the Analects or the Three Character Classic aloud, in unison, years before anyone explains it, on the theory that a text in memory can be understood later while a text understood once cannot be recalled. Denounced as feudal for most of the twentieth century and revived from the 1990s, now with weekend academies and phone apps.
Dujing, classics recitation, is the traditional pedagogy: children chant texts aloud in unison, repeatedly, from around four years old, long before any explanation is offered, on the principle that memory precedes comprehension and that a text held in memory can be understood at forty while a text merely understood at eight cannot be recovered. The starting texts were primers — the Three Character Classic, the Thousand Character Classic, the Classic of Filial Piety — before the Four Books. The practice was denounced as feudal rote-learning through the twentieth century in both China and Korea and abolished from state curricula. It has revived substantially since the 1990s through private academies, weekend classes, summer camps and apps, and it is politically legible: Qufu's municipal programme reports several hundred thousand participations in classics recitation and etiquette training over a decade. Critics inside China argue it substitutes ritualised nostalgia for education; defenders argue it restores a transmission that was deliberately broken.
The same ground, other faiths
rites that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.