"You can't just cook adults and children together, right?"
"It can be divided into two batches, day shift and night shift. [Full text reading]" Du Wen proposed her plan, "Children will be in the daytime and adults will be in the evening."
"You can't do this." Wang Luobin shook his head repeatedly, "You have never been in the countryside - your children are half of the labor force in the countryside. The villagers will definitely not agree if they go to school during the day."
Du Wen was right. In comparison, she was more interested in adult night classes: "Then just take half-day classes and do a good job in night classes..."
"It's even more outrageous." Before Wang Luobin could say anything, Chen Haiyang shook his head. "My relatives went to the countryside to join the army during the Cultural Revolution. Night schools were occasionally held at that time, but they were all closed during busy farming periods - farmers' labor intensity is high, and they have to work hard. If you have to rest after a long day of work, who will come to your night school?"
"That's right." Wang Luobin nodded repeatedly, "And before you realize the benefits of being educated, it will be difficult for you to attract them to study."
Du Wen saw that they all objected and became a little anxious: "Then we can't do it?"
"Okay, let's hold a training class first, and then we'll also provide elite education." Xi Yazhou said half-jokingly.
The so-called elite education Xi Yazhou mentioned is actually a training class for cadres. This kind of temporary short-term training course was often used in local work in the past: to cultivate activists who are close to the organization - although their purposes are different, through training to improve their consciousness, strengthen organizational discipline, and learn how to work , and eventually became the transmission gear that drives the masses in countless grassroots organizations.
Of course, this is easier said than done. The so-called opening up of a place is the most difficult. Especially the traditional rural society which is quite closed and conservative. The crisis faced by the salt farm gave the travelers an excellent opportunity to break into the local society. From this point of view, the wealthy households were their main contributors.
So who are the activists? There were the Tan family father and son, Village Chief Tan's daughter, and some young people who were close friends with Tan Chengqing. Naturally, it is inconvenient for a single girl to go to class at night with a group of men, so at first this night class was only for men.
Wang Luobin was not in a hurry to gather everyone seriously. He just went to Tan Guihuang first and said that he wanted to set up a school for the children to teach them reading and abacus. Tan Guihuang looked embarrassed and said that the children in the village had to help with farm work on weekdays. If they were asked to go to school, their parents would not agree. Wang Luobin promised that he would only attend half-day classes every day to ensure that he would not miss farm work. Tan Guihuang reluctantly agreed to go and talk about it. To be on the safe side, Wang Luobin also sent Zhang Xingjiao to lobby. Xi Yazhou originally wanted to promise free lunch to the children who came to study, but this was too reluctant for the dwindling food reserves.
There were quite a few children who came last. Although most people felt that it was useless for their children to study, it would not hurt the farmers if they could learn some words and do some accounting. Furthermore, the schooling lasts only half a day and does not affect the work in the fields.
Classes in the school are held for four hours every afternoon, starting at 12 o'clock and ending at 4 o'clock. However, the salt people, like most ancient residents, have little accurate concept of time. In order to establish this concept, an electric speaker was installed in the Gehong Temple camp, which automatically played every hour: It is x o'clock in Lingao time - Xi Yazhou knew that instead of instilling in them the concept of what time and what time, It's not as useful as doing it so subtly.
The members of the work team have invested a lot of enthusiasm in this education plan. The curriculum is arranged to emphasize simplicity and practicality. The main content at this stage is literacy and calculation.
Generally, reading Chinese requires mastering at least 500 basic Chinese characters, so Wang Luobin's literacy plan is based on 500 basic Chinese characters. For this school, he specially returned to Bairen City and found two suitable textbooks from the computer database of the Intelligence Data Group: the 1959 edition of "Rural Literacy Textbook" and the 1971 edition of "Rural Practical Mathematics", both of which were It was a textbook specially compiled for rural education. It is easy to understand and highly targeted. Especially rural practical mathematics, not only simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, but also highly practical content such as calculation of yield per mu, volume calculation, simple geometric measurement, etc.
However, there are many words and phrases in these two textbooks that have a strong flavor of the times, such as "the great leader**" that appears frequently, and "in the great proletarian cultural revolution..." Wang Luobin copied and rewritten it overnight, and found the printer in the printing room. Zhou Dongtian asked him to print 3o sets.
"30 sets?" Zhou Dongtian is now a bit stingy - his paper reserve has not been replenished. And these are two books, not a few-page document or a tabloid.
"Yes, 30 sets, elementary textbooks. The sooner, the better!"
Zhou Dongtian looked through the manuscript and saw that there were many illustrations in it. He couldn't help but hesitate. The workload of drawing alone was quite large. However, he still promised to come up with the finished product as soon as possible.
However, Wang Luobin also added Chinese Pinyin teaching content in primary school Chinese to the textbook. Wang Luobin has always believed that simplified Chinese characters and Chinese Pinyin are the two most important weapons for popularizing basic education in New China.
He showed this set of teaching materials to Zhang Xingjiao, and as expected, he was opposed by the middle-aged boy. In Zhang Tongsheng's view, these "vulgar characters" were not shocking, but as an education he objected to the use of "vulgar characters" Included in the textbook - "It's misleading to the children." He commented.
Wang Luobin said that this was mainly to simplify education and facilitate children's reading and writing. Besides, the purpose of educating these children was not to take the imperial examination, recite poems and write poems correctly, as long as they could write their names, write letters, and read some simple books.
However, Zhang Xingjiao still feels quite awkward. In fact, he knows almost all of these simplified characters. In his opinion, simplified characters can only be used for practical purposes, not for style: "The students you teach like this will make people laugh to death. The articles they write are generally The articles are all in common Chinese characters. Even if others don’t laugh at us, we are still worthy of being teachers.” As he spoke, he became emotional, almost ready to defend the traditional Chinese characters to the death.
Zhang Xingjiao also disagreed with the literacy textbooks. In his opinion, a thousand-character text and hundreds of surnames for children's education were enough, and newly compiled books were unnecessary. Seeing the beautifully printed literacy textbook, he exclaimed that it was a pity - and marked many phrases and sentence patterns in the textbook as "unreasonable."
After Wang Luobin endured Zhang Xing's criticism for more than an hour, he proposed to him a fair competition: each of them would lead a class to see who could learn to read and write first. Zhang Xingjiao was stunned. He read the literacy textbook carefully again, and then said after a while: "Your simplified characters make it easier to recognize and write. Naturally, you have the upper hand..."
"Yes, our set of simplified characters has the advantage of being easy to learn and remember. People do not need too advanced knowledge. Literacy is just for the convenience of life." Wang Luobin explained patiently. Zhang Xingjiao was the first intellectual they had in-depth contact with. His attitude can roughly tell what kind of views intellectuals in the Ming Dynasty had on the culture of time travellers.
After some persuasion, Wang Luobin took another step back: Zhang Xingjiao was still reluctant to propose teaching simplified and traditional Chinese characters at the same time. However, it was commendable that these overseas people could run schools for poor children. Besides, I am also someone else's slave, so I can't make things too tense. Thinking of this, he finally agreed to assist Wang Luobin's teaching. Scholars in ancient times still had a sense of responsibility to educate the common people, unlike modern people who became teachers for the benefits of guaranteed income during droughts and floods and winter and summer vacations.
But for Wang Luobin, he was not satisfied. He failed to really convince a small Ming intellectual to accept his argument.
In order to avoid interference, in the initial stage, he started teaching from Pinyin letters and taught the children the sounds of Pinyin letters - once they learned Pinyin, they also mastered the correct pronunciation of Mandarin. After all, time travelers need to be educated in Mandarin. Children's language learning ability is far better than that of adults, so education can get twice the result with half the effort.
In Zhang Xingjiao's view, Wang Luobin's teaching method is completely unbelievable. Confucian students like Zhang Xingjiao have received enlightenment education since ancient times. When students enter school, they first read the Three-Character Classic, the Thousand-Character Classic, Hundred Family Surnames, and Prodigy Poems. They learn to write by tracing red with a pen. Teachers basically I don’t talk about it, I just read a paragraph with the children every day and let them read and recite it over and over again. This kind of teaching usually doesn't end until the "Four Books" are finished. The average student can recite the Four Books by heart and knows almost all the words.
But Wang Luobin started the class with something like a winding ghost drawing that he didn't understand at all. What's the word for a goose? He also made many beautiful cards: the word "e" is a goose, and he taught the sounds very intuitively. After coming out, the students memorized these things as if they were singing, and then used these characters to mark each word. Seeing this use, Zhang Xingjiao suddenly realized that the pinyin letters that Wang Chang talked about all day long were used to notate phonetic notation, which was similar to the tangent and inverse tangents learned by literati. (Note: There are many ways for ancient people to mark the pronunciation of characters. The most common one is to use tangent and inverse. It is a compulsory course in the Chinese Department to study ancient Chinese.
However, Zhang Xingjiao also admitted that after learning this set of "pinyin letters", he could recognize new words much faster. There are even some smarter children who can read on their own based on the pinyin markings in the textbooks. This quick method greatly interested him, and he asked Wang Luobin which great scholar came up with it. Wang Luobin said that this set of pinyin and simplified characters were developed by the overseas scholar "Wen Gaiwei" after a lifetime of hard work - the purpose was to enable all Chinese people around the world to be able to read and write. Such a great ideal awes Zhang Xingjiao.
