REMOLDING THE RULING CLASS 125him devote himself seriously to spreading these teachings. And he saw to it that
these teachings permeated [the minds of the people] thoroughly and gradually
entered into their thinking so that what was upright in their Heavenly endowed
natures would naturally be exposed ... and so there was no fear that people
might be lacking in a sense of shame .... "The sages could not, however, leave education exclusively to the private devices
of the people, but found it necessary to create institutions for the moral trans-
formation of the people by appointing educational officials and staffing a school
system with teachers. Emperor Shun's appointment of a Ssu-t'u thus set the prece-
dent for the creation of institutions of education, which supposedly by the late
Chou period reached a high degree of complexity and elaboration. In the Chou
model as described in the Rites of Chou (Chou-Ii), Book of Rites (Li-chi), His-
tory of the Han Dynasty (Han-shu) and other sources, there was a hierarchy of
officials each charged with both general and specific educational tasks at each
level of administration and a hierarchy of schools reaching from the smallest
communities in the hinterland up to the national academy (kuo-hsueh, kukhak)
or great academy (t'ai-hsueh, t'aehak) in the capital.^12 In Yu's mind, this com-
plete set of educational officials and schools was not only the institutional pre-
requisite for a successful program of moral transformation of the ordinary
population, but the sine qua non of the training of the ruling class.
The Chou Curriculum: Virtue, Behavior, the Arts. Yu believed that the ancient
system of education contained a core of ethical concepts with a core curricu-
lum of books that were essential for proper moral training. Classical knowledge
was divided into three major categories: virtue, behavior, and the arts (tok, haeng,
ye). The Rites of Chou defined the six virtues as knowledge, humaneness, sagac-
ity, righteousness, loyalty, and harmony, and a commentary on the Book of Rites
spoke of the "seven teachings" governing the relations between people.
Knowledge of these virtues, however, was not enough; instruction in proper
behavior was necessary to translate moral education into action. The Rites of
Chou defined the six modes of behavior as filial piety, comradeship, friendship,
closeness in marriage relations, responsibility, and compassion for the less for-
tunate. Yu emphasized the important link between knowledge and action by a
reference to Chu Hsi's commentary on this section of the Book of Rites in which
Chu referred to the oft-cited formula in The Great Learning (Ta-hsueh) that the
individual proceeds from self-cultivation to the regulation of the family, to the
governance of the state, and finally to the pacification of the world. 13
The text of and commentary on the Hstieh-chi section of the Book of Rites
described an arduous prolonged process of nine years of study in a national acad-
emy designed to achieve the perfection of behavior. The course of study began
with the reading and understanding of classical texts. By the third year students
had to be able to get along with their fellow students, by the fifth year to show
respect for their teachers, by the seventh to demonstrate knowledge of the prin-
ciples learned and be observed associating with other students of high moral