Victor's Pursuit of Serenity Chapter 36

The spiritual food provided by the ancients to children was compressed biscuits. The earliest works such as Cangjie and Shizhuan had four-character sentences, which was understandable because they were literacy textbooks. Why were the stories and moral teachings so dry later? Young students in ancient Rome could read adapted passages from Homer, Menander, and Virgil, and act out those scenes themselves. Why didn't we let our children read... What to read? Before novels such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, there was really nothing to read.

Some people think that four words in a sentence is too much. Zhu Xi once wrote an epitaph, which was written in three words, "Zhu's daughter, born in Guisi" and so on. He only used forty or fifty words to describe the life of a person. I don't believe that if the writer has any enthusiasm for the topic, he would be so brief. His student Chen Chun compiled "Qimeng Chusong", which is written in three words and is the forerunner of "Three Character Classic". Why use three words? He explained that children cannot speak very long sentences. Is there any stranger reason?

Later, the Three Character Classic was created. The principles in it are basically the same as those in Taigong Jiajiao or earlier primers, except that one word is missing from each sentence. Unfortunately, modern foreign forces have disrupted the course of Chinese culture. Otherwise, it is obvious that the Two Character Classic and even the One Character Classic would have appeared, leading to the supreme realm of the Great Dao without words.

The Three Character Classic is meant for recitation, but the problem is that ancient teachers did not provide children with rich and interesting reading materials. But even if it is used for recitation, reciting the Three Character Classic is not as good as reciting more complex texts, because language training is the training of the mind, and only complex sentences can develop order. Some people think for a long time before saying a sentence, but what they think of is irrelevant to the previous sentence. In my opinion, this person is either a leader or his childhood tutor who was afraid that the child would not understand and only used simple sentences for him.

It is harmless for children today to recite the Three Character Classic, because they have other reading materials (although they have less and less time to read leisure books), they can watch TV (although the people on TV speak more and more like childish words), and they can play games that also have dialogues (although no one understands what is being said).