ABSTRACT
The Chinese have been induced by the force of events to abandon almost entirely an age-old system of literary education. The education of the Chou Dynasty has at all times been the object of admiration of the Chinese themselves. Education is the perpetuation of a culture, and all culture, especially intellectual, is built upon language: this statement is perhaps truer of China than of any other country, and language means rather the ideographic written medium than the spoken dialects. The written languages of other countries have changed with the change of speech, whilst in China the characters, and their meanings. The literary language has been an artificial thing for a thousand years or more, and for all its stylistic variations it has been essentially the same throughout the ages. The purely literary nature of study meant that in China "men occupy themselves with words rather than with things; and the processes of acquisition are more cultivated than those of invention".
