Accessory Institutions

A system of schools, academies, colleges, and universities obtained in
villages, districts, departments, and principalities. The instruction
was divided into 'Primary Learning' and 'Great Learning.' There were
special schools of dancing and music. Libraries and almshouses for
old men are mentioned. Associations of scholars for literary purposes
seem to have been numerous.

Whatever form and direction education might have taken, it became
stereotyped at an early age by the road to office being made to
lead through a knowledge of the classical writings of the ancient
sages. It became not only 'the thing' to be well versed in the sayings
of Confucius, Mencius; etc., and to be able to compose good essays on
them containing not a single wrongly written character, but useless
for aspirants to office--who constituted practically the whole of the
literary class--to acquire any other knowledge. So obsessed was the
national mind by this literary mania that even infants' spines were
made to bend so as to produce when adult the 'scholarly stoop.' And
from the fact that besides the scholar class the rest of the community
consisted of agriculturists, artisans, and merchants, whose knowledge
was that of their fathers and grandfathers, inculcated in the sons
and grandsons as it had been in them, showing them how to carry on
in the same groove the calling to which Fate had assigned them, a
departure from which would have been considered 'unfilial'--unless,
of course (as it very rarely did), it went the length of attaining
through study of the classics a place in the official class, and thus
shedding eternal lustre on the family--it will readily be seen that
there was nothing to cause education to be concerned with any but one
or two of the subjects which are included by Western peoples under