266 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
Benefits of membership in the shenshi class were immense. Membership
required passing at least the first level of examinations. And so sons were set to
study hard to pass the examinations that led to official appointments. Because
the families of scholar-officials benefited by shared status, wealth, and lineage
prominence at local levels, tremendous pressure was placed on sons to succeed.
The expansion of the class of scholars was assisted by the invention of the book
made with cheap paper and woodblock printing.
We know something about life in the schools of Song China (Lee 1977).
When a boy was five or six his family decided whether he was bright enough to
warrant the expense of a classical (i.e., Confucian) education. (Girls could not
sit for examinations. We return later to the life women led during these years.)
The rich hired tutors. Sons of poor relatives might be allowed to study with
these rich boys, and sometimes an extended family or lineage group would
pool money in support of an especially promising boy’s education. The tutors
were often young men further along the examination path. An advanced
scholar who needed an income might rent a room or set up in a Buddhist tem-
ple and recruit pupils from local families. Men who failed the later stages
sometimes made a career of tutoring younger boys. There were a few govern-
ment-sponsored elementary schools, such as one in Kaifeng with more than a
thousand pupils.
Of course, most peasant boys went straight to the fields, and sons of old
gentry families had some advantages over a first-generation scholar, much like
today in the United States. Sons of scholar-officials might travel with their
fathers and inherit their libraries. But in the end, it depended on the hard work,
determination, and abilities of the boys themselves. They lived lives devoted to
examinations. Men might sit for the examinations a dozen times or more
before finally passing or giving up. A popular nineteenth-century novel
describes a large lineage in which only two of 60 to 70 brothers and cousins
entertained guests; all the rest stayed behind closed doors, studying for exams
(Chang 1955:171).
All the exams were devoted to the Confucian Classics. It was as if the sec-
retary of the interior, of treasury, of state, the state governors, and all public
officials were appointed to these positions based on their expertise in the writ-
ings of Plato and Aristotle. The system produced generalists, not specialists;
what was wanted to govern the state were junzi (chun-tzu), morally cultivated
gentlemen, not experts in irrigation, international relations, or commerce. “A
gentleman is not a pot,” reads one of Confucius’s obscurer statements. He
meant that a junzi is not trained to a particular purpose (a pot) but is a general-
ist. As Stephen Owen wrote:
The same question resurfaced in the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s,
transformed into the “Red versus expert” controversy, which asked whether
public projects should be managed by good communists or by specialists. To
the surprise of no one who knew the Chinese tradition, it was concluded that
“not pot” communists would be the sounder choice. (Owen 1997:38)