从焚书到读书 叶圣陶
从焚书到读书叶圣陶 人类真是奇怪的动物，生来便有所谓“智慧”。以有智慧故，从最初劳动时或惊骇时所发的呼声，进化而为互通情感的语言，由语言而造出文字，用文字记载事物，便又产生“书”这一类东西。书，又是奇怪的东西：说它可爱呢，它确能把人类过去从奋斗中所得到的经验和理论都告诉了后来的人，做后来人努力的方向。说它可恶呢，自从它把经验理论告诉了后来人，便使阶级化了的人类社会常常感到不安。
在可恶这一点上，二千一百多年前聪明的秦始皇已经觉到了，他便取激烈手段，索性把藏在民间的书统统付之一炬。
但究竟这手段太激烈，不久便有不读书的刘项，起来把妄想传之万世的秦朝打倒。后来的皇帝更加聪明，他们知道既然有了“书”这件东西，要根本毁灭是不可能的，与其“焚”，还不如索性教人家“读”，不过“读”要有一定的范围、一定的方法，于是便找出了几种有利于当时社会的支配阶级的理论的书，定名为“圣经贤传”，其他诸子百家便是“异端邪说”，都在“罢黜”之列，更定下一个“使天下英雄入吾彀中”的科举制度。一般人读了圣经贤传，不难在科举制度下名利双收，否则读着异端邪说的书，便是“非圣无法”，可以使你身首异处。那时奖励青年们读书有四句口号道：“天子重英豪，文章教尔曹，万般皆下品，唯有读书高。”
现在科举制度早已废止了，但是科举的精神依旧存在着。
政府的煌煌明令，学者名流的谆谆告诫，都是说“青年应该读书”！读什么书呢？他们没有说，大概便因为有所谓“标准”在，不用细说了。合乎标准的，有文凭可拿，有资格可得。不合乎标准的书籍，便等于从前所谓诸子百家，是异端邪说，教师不敢介绍，书店也不敢刊行，青年们更少有读到的机会了。不过社会究竟在进步，口号和以前不同了：“非圣无法”现在简称为“反动”，“……唯有读书高”现在一变而为“读书救国”了。
从“焚书”到“读书”，方法和口号尽管在变换，精神是一贯的。我们不知道教学生埋头读书的学者名流有否想到这一层。
From BurningBooks to Advocating “Reading” By Ye Shengtao
Human beings are really peculiar creatures. They wereborn with wisdom, with which they evolved their shouting and yelling they madeat work or when they were frightened into language that carried certain meaningshared by them. Out of this kind of language, human beings invented words torecord what was communicated and what had happened, and thus, books came intobeing.
Books are also peculiar. Why? Because they are lovelyand at the same time abominable. They are lovely, considering their usefulnessand reliability in keeping a record of those theories and experience of ourforefathers for the descendents to orient their way of thinking and living; theyare abominable, because they have sent those rulers in class society into anunsettled panic since they gave away those theories and experience to their people.
The shrewd Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of QinDynasty, must have sensed the unfavorable power of books, for he took radicalmeasures to burn almost all the nongovernmental books and bury many scholarsalive without further ado to exterminate the evil effects caused by books.
However, this measure was after all overly radical andsoon it brought forth the two illiterate peasants, Liu Bang and Xiang Yu, who roseup against Qin Shihuang’s brutal ruling and brought down Qin Dynasty which QinShihuang had wishfully professed to last forever. Having drawn lesson fromthat, the following emperors were even shrewd. Rather than rashly and indistinguishablyburn all those books which were impossible to root out since their origins, theychanged their measures by limiting their people’s reading to a certain range ofbooks which would not pose much threatening to their ruling. In order to makethis method feasible and fulfill their goal, they picked out some books whichwere mainly Confucius works for their people to read and blacklisted any otherbooks which were defined by them as heresies. They also set out to establish anofficial recruiting system to gather all the nation’s intellectuals and bendthem to the maintenance and consolidation of their reign. It was then commonknowledge that you would gain a notable reputation and noticeable wealth aswell if you, as an intellectual under this talent selecting system, kept your mindon those designated books and never touched those forbidden ones which wouldotherwise cause death to befall you. This notion has fossilized the outlook ofmost of those intellectuals and later ones, but what could they pursue other thanfame and wealth when the entire society all advocated those pursuits. There wentaround among commoners as well as officials a slogan which read as follows: Theemperor attaches great importance and gives first priority to intellectuals andhe has written articles advocating that reading and learning are foremost andalone respectable while all others are nothing.
This imperial civil examination system has long beenabolished, but the contaminating spirit intrinsic in it still remains.
The consistent policies and orders of the government,together with the repeated admonishments from those celebrities in academiccircles, have all focused on the assertion that young people should read.However, they have not specified what to read because there has been inexistence an invisible standard for everyone to follow. There is no need topoint it out for everyone is able to know what it is from their tacitunderstanding. If you follow the accepted standard and act accordingly, youwill be likely to obtain your desired diplomas and certificates. But if not, ifyou dare to expose yourself to those forbidden heretical books which are almostinaccessible, you will have more than probably destroyed your perhaps otherwisebrilliant future. Those forbidden books, like kind of horrible plague, teachersdare not recommend them, and no bookstores venture to sell them, let alone therebeing any access for those young people to them. But after all, the wholesociety is advancing and the slogan advances too. Nowadays the slogan takes onanother look: what was once “lawlessness and ignorance of imperial power” now canbe simply put as “reactionary” and the once “reading and learning alone arerespectable” is simplified as “reading to save the nation”.
From burning books to advocating “reading”, thoughthere has seen a constant change of naming and means of implementation, their ultimatepurpose has been invariably the same. I’m wondering whether those scholars andcelebrities in academic circles have ever realized that.
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