Do Your Homework! Did Confucius say that? Lots of Chinese think so. (millions enrol in programs teaching Confucian classics)(Brief Article) Paul Mooney.

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Byline: Paul Mooney

The toddlers clad in satiny Chinese tunics don't seem to be taking the day's lesson to heart. As a 5-year-old girl recites from the Confucian classic, Discipline of Students, boys in the back row smack each other with their textbooks. Another girl in the front breaks into tears. The speaker's mother confesses she's not sure her daughter understands her lines, but she insists, "My daughter has become much more polite since she started attending classes here." Yuan Shiqui, an official at the National Studies School in Beijing, echoes the optimism. "They don't necessarily understand what they're reciting," he says of the preschoolers. "But gradually it will have an impact on their thinking."

That has always been the strategy behind the classic Confucian education: memorize moral precepts in the hopes of improving one's character. The sixth-century B.C. philosopher believed in maintaining a strict social order, and he also provided advice on good governance: "Promote the straight and throw out the twisty," he advised, "and the people will keep order." In the early years of the 20th century, however, Chinese intellectuals blamed the Confucian system for stifling creative thought. After the communists took over in 1949, Confucius himself became a class enemy; a mob famously ransacked his birthplace of Qufu during the Cultural Revolution. For decades his works were castigated as medieval pap.

But in their quest for something to believe in other than the party or money, Chinese have begun to rediscover their most renowned moralist. Nationwide more than 2 million children are enrolled in programs teaching Confucian classics, and several major universities now offer degree programs in Chinese traditional culture. Confucian temples abandoned for the last half century have been spruced up and now draw crowds of students. "Even real-estate companies have called to ask us to set up schools in their complexes," says Yang Disheng, vice president of the China Confucius Society. "They thought this would help them sell apartments faster."

The appetite for a return to "traditional values" is also drawing critics. Education experts in Asia now generally agree, for instance, that the problem with the region's schools is too much rote memorization, not too little. Feng Zhonglian, a 72-year-old psychology professor who received an old-style education, told the newspaper Beijing Today that reciting Confucian classics was "boring and useless." Others have argued that young people are unable to discriminate between what one history professor called "the essence and the dregs of traditional culture."