Cat Country (19 page)

I wasn’t laughing at them alone, I was laughing at their whole society. Everywhere one looked, one found suspicion, pettiness, selfishness and neglect. You couldn’t find an ounce of honesty, magnanimity, integrity or generosity in the entire society. In a society where principals are dissection material for their students, how could you expect a man to claim the honour of being principal? Darkness, darkness, total darkness. Was it possible they were unaware that I had saved their lives? Very possibly, for in such a dark society, the concept of saving another man’s life was probably unknown. I thought of Madam Ambassador and the eight little sexpots. They were probably still rotting away back there. The principal, the teacher, the professor, the ambassador’s wife, the eight little vixens – did any of them have anything worthy of being called a life? Without realising it, I had begun to shed tears.

YOUNG SCORPION AS HISTORIAN

T
HE FOLLOWING
is what Young Scorpion told me. ‘When the people of every other nation of Mars were still in a state of barbarism, we were already in possession of an educational system, for Cat Country is an ancient culture. Our present system of education, however, was plagiarised from abroad. In saying “plagiarised” I don’t mean to imply that we ought not to copy from others. But I do think that imitating other people can prove an extremely tricky business. To be sure, copying and learning from one another is a fine thing. One might even say that it is an important impetus for the advancement of human civilisation. But while we found that it was imperative for us to study the new educational institutions of other states, none of them has adopted our old system. This gives some indication of the relative value of the two systems.

‘If we were really able to do a good job of copying so that our educational system might stand on a par with that of any other country, then even though we were merely copying, still no one could cast aspersions on our ability. However, although we have been practising the new system of education for over two hundred years, we are still in a state of utter chaos. This proves that we aren’t even capable of imitating. The result is that while we can no longer practise our original system, we can’t learn anyone else’s either. You see, as a pessimist, I readily grant that our people are retarded. The renaissance of a retarded people is bound to be a joke, and hence our new educational system is a travesty.

‘You asked why you saw small children being graduated from the university. You’re much too honest, or perhaps one ought to say “stupid”. Didn’t you realise that that too was a joke? Graduate? That was the first day of school for all of those children. If you’re going to play the fool, then go whole-hog with no reservations. That’s one thing we
can
be proud of: when we play jokes, we pull out all the stops. The history of our educational system for the past two hundred years has been a history of tomfoolery, and now we are rapidly approaching the end of the script. We’ve exhausted all the humour from the situation. No one today, no matter how witty he may be, can milk that script for any more laughs; it’s gone dry.

‘When the new educational system first came into effect, our schools were divided into a number of levels like any other country’s, and the students had to start at the bottom and work their way up, one step at a time, through a system of examinations, before they could graduate. But in the course of two hundred years of improvement and advancement, we gradually did away with examinations. Any student who put in the required time could graduate, regardless of whether or not he attended classes. However, there remained a status inequality between a primary school graduate and a university graduate. Now, since we didn’t require either primary school students or university students to attend classes, why should anyone be satisfied with second best? Therefore we decided on a thoroughgoing innovation: anyone who went to school would be counted as a university graduate on the first day of classes. Let him graduate first, and then . . . come to think of it, since he has already graduated, there is no “and then”.

‘Actually, this was the best of all possible systems for Cat Country. You see, statistically we have the highest number of university graduates of any country on Mars. Of course, being first numerically makes us feel good, makes us downright proud. We Cat Country people are the most practical people on Mars. If you want to estimate the relative worth of things, the most practical way is to count. And when you start counting the number of university graduates – well, no one else can match us. It’s a fact. Everybody knows it’s a fact, and everybody smiles with satisfaction.

‘The emperor himself is very satisfied with the system. If he weren’t enthusiastic about education, how would we have so many university graduates? Thus, he has done well by his people and is pleased. The teachers also like the system, for under it everybody is a university professor; every school is the highest academic institution in the land; and every student is first in his class. Think of the honour and glory! Heads of families are pleased with the system too. Every seven-year-old brat is a university graduate, and the intelligence of the children is, of course, a credit to the parents. And the students? Well, they love it. If a child is lucky enough to be born in Cat Country and survive until the age of six or seven, he is sure to attain the status of university graduate.

‘From an economic point of view, the system is still more marvellous. You see, when schools were first established, the emperor himself had to pay the cost out of his own pocket; and yet the students who went through the system often had the nerve to oppose the emperor’s wishes and made trouble for him. As far as the emperor was concerned, this was nothing else but spending his own money to buy trouble. But under our new Graduate-the-First-Day system, the emperor is able to produce a huge number of graduates every year without spending a thing. Furthermore, the students produced by the new system are much more tractable and get along very well with His Majesty.

‘Of course, quite a few of our teachers do starve to death, but the number of university graduates goes on increasing anyway. In the beginning, the principals and teachers were paid, with the result that they were at each other’s throats from morning till night in such fierce competition for salaries that a few were killed every day. Sometimes they even incited the students to riot so that no one got any peace. Now that the emperor doesn’t give them any money, what is there for them to fight about? If they demand their pay, he simply ignores them; and if they press him too hard, he calls out the troops with clubs to play a tune on the tops of their heads. The students used to back them up in their demands, but now, since they all graduate on the first day anyway, even the students won’t help them. Since the teachers can’t look to any quarter for support, they have to content themselves with waiting around until they starve to death.

‘Thus, for the heads of households, the question of tuition for their children is solved in one fell swoop. All they have to do is send their brats to school on the first day and their educational responsibility ends there. And since the parents have to feed the children, whether they go to school or stay at home, why not let them go to school and pick up a degree and a little status? There are no expenses for books and writing materials anyway, for people don’t go to school in order to study in the first place. They go to pick up status, and they get it – on the very first day! What do you think of our system?’

‘Why do you still need principals and teachers?’ I asked.

‘To explain that, I’ll first have to say something about the evolution of the system over the past two centuries. You see, in the beginning, the schools offered a variety of curricula. Some of our students studied engineering, some studied commerce, and some studied agriculture – but what was there for them to do after they graduated? Those who had studied engineering picked up a bit of foreign technology, but since we have no industry, what use was it? Those who studied commerce learned something of foreign business methods, but here in Cat Country we only have street pedlars. Any large scale enterprise that opens up is immediately confiscated by the military. Those who studied agriculture learned foreign methods of farming, but since we don’t plant anything here but reverie leaves, what use was it?

‘Since under this kind of educational system, our schools were totally unrelated to the society around them, what could the students do after they graduated? There were only two alternatives: become an official or a teacher. Of course, to be an official you had to have connections. If you had an influential friend at court, then you could rocket to the top immediately, no matter what you had studied in college. But not everyone was lucky enough to have money and pull, and for those people the next best thing was to teach. After all, having received a modern education, they couldn’t very well lower themselves to become manual labourers or pedlars.

‘Thus the society was gradually divided into two kinds of people: university graduates and non-university graduates. The former were determined to go into teaching and officialdom; the latter became manual labourers and pedlars. For the time being I won’t take up the question of the influence of this situation on politics, but merely confine myself to its effects on education. It turned our educational system into a cyclical one: I study, I graduate, and then I teach your children. Your children study, graduate, and then teach my children. They constantly imbibe the same old line of learning, and consequently their characters deteriorate bit by bit every day. How can I best explain it? There were more and more graduates every day and, except for those who become officials, they all wanted teaching assignments. There just weren’t enough schools to go around and the results, of course, were ludicrous.

‘The only purpose of this cyclical system of education was to pass on a reading knowledge of a few immortal textbooks; it had nothing to do with the cultivation of personal integrity. Sometimes in competing for a chair, one or two years of civil war would be stirred up with so much slaughter and bloodshed that one might really have thought that people were laying down their lives to elevate our cultural level when as a matter of fact the whole thing was only over salary.

‘Gradually the emperor, politicians and militarists all began cutting into the operating expenses of our educational institutions. Then the educators began throwing all of their underlying energies into organising movements to demand back salary. Teaching stopped altogether and the students, having discovered what their teachers were really like, got into the habit of skipping classes. It was at this point that there began the Graduate-the-First-Day Movement that I just told you about. And that movement, of course, slit the jugular vein of the entire system – operating expenses. The emperor, the politicians, the militarists and the heads of households all wholeheartedly approved of the Graduate-the-First-Day Movement because of the money that it saved.

‘Everyone considered education to be useless anyway and nobody respected the hacks who were its purveyors; thus everyone was more than content to make the saving. And yet no one dared to close the schools down completely for fear of foreign ridicule. And so, the doors of the schools remained open as before and the number of university graduates even increased, but no money was spent. Since the doors were open to everyone, “cyclical education” became “universal education”, in other words, no education at all. But the schools were open for business as usual. Thus it was that our educational system became the biggest joke that Mars had ever cracked.

‘When this movement had reached full maturity, it did not reduce in the slightest degree our principals’ and teachers’ enthusiasm for education. They still fought with each other over positions tooth and nail. You’re wondering why.

‘Well, you see, in the beginning the schools really did look like proper schools: they had desks, chairs, and equipment of every kind. When the system was still supported by a yearly budget, principals and instructors used to make money by selling school property. Then the principals began fighting for the principalships of the larger schools with the highest annual appropriations, and the result was widespread bloodshed. No matter how you look at it, you must admit the emperor handled this situation in a most humane fashion: he simply discontinued the annual appropriations for the schools. Having done this, he was far too embarrassed to be so strict as to go on and forbid the sale of school property. Well, the competition over principalships came to an end, and then, one by one, the schools turned themselves into wholesale bargain-lands. Everything that could possibly be moved was sold. Thus it is that now every school is nothing more than an empty piece of ground surrounded by four walls.

‘You’re probably still wondering why it is that people continue to want to be principals and teachers. Well, in the first place they don’t have anything else to do anyway. Furthermore, every other consideration aside, the rank of teacher or principal is still useful; the road to advancement under our cyclical system of education is from student to teacher, and from teacher to principal. While it’s true that principals and teachers have no hope of obtaining any salary, they can use the school system as a ladder to officialdom. And so it is that, while there is no
education
in our schools, there
are
students, teachers and principals. Moreover, every single school is the “highest academic institution”. And when a student hears that his school is the highest academic institution, he’s so bowled over that he’s not apt to worry about anything else. Since there’s no education to be had in the schools, what do people who
really
want to study do? They revive the old system and hire family tutors. Of course, only the wealthier families can afford this. The vast majority of children still had to go to the public schools to come by their ignorance.

‘The utter failure of this system of education has resulted in the obliteration of Cat Country’s last shadow of hope. The very first period during which the new educational system was tried was contemporaneous with the corruption of the “new learning” which the new system was supposed to introduce. The new system had to be transported to us from abroad simultaneously with the new learning. If one calls learning “new”, then that is a clear indication that learning is always advancing and developing, gathering new truths to itself every minute of every day. But as soon as the new system and the new learning arrived here, they both grew white hair as quickly as a vegetable moulds during rainy weather.