What China Can Teach Writing Teachers

by Clay Burell

Published April 12, 2009 @ 07:04AM PT

I just read a passage so striking I have to share it. It's from one "Y. Lin," who wrote a 1936 book on China called My Country and My People, and is quoted in Richard E. Nisbett's The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (another keeper):

In Chinese literary criticism there are different methods of writing called "the method of watching a fire across the river" (detachment of style), "the method of dragonflies skimming across the water surface" (lightness of touch), "the method of painting a dragon and dotting its eyes" (bringing out the salient points). (p. 18)

Nisbett's whole point in this book of "cultural psychology" is to show that modes of thought differ from culture to culture, that Enlightenment universalism is belied by the evidence, etc, etc. The point of the passage itself is to illustrate how unlike our abstract and essentialist Greek way of thinking is the Chinese, which resists hard categories and prefers, as Nisbett puts it, "expressive, metaphoric language."

I'm going to follow the dragonfly method and leave it to you to watch the ripples of that quote, or not. Just two quick impressions before I go:

First, it somehow ties to the notion of Core Knowledge, and underscores to me the need for that "Core" to be wordly, and not ethnocentric, in order to avoid a sort of in-bred genetic shallowness. We can learn much by trying to see through Chinese eyes, for example, and see our own cultural "core" differently, and surely often benefit from that. (Hell, the Greeks learned from traveling to Egypt, Crete, Asia Minor and the Levant, and North Africa anyway. Their knowledge came less from the core than that far-flung periphery, and it's the synthesis they performed with it all that was the thing.)

Second, as a writing teacher, I cannot wait to share the above with students. Our Western language for teaching writing does seem, as Nisbett claims, abstract and categorical and, when you think about it from the Chinese angle, mind-numbingly dull: "expository," "persuasive," "argumentative," "analytical," and so forth are not words to inflame a young mind. But "watching the fire from across the river"? "Skimming the water like a dragonfly"? "Dotting the dragon's eyes"? Oh, yes.

(Third: point two illustrates point one.)

Just sharing. I'm tired of writing, reading, and thinking about Arne Duncan and charter schools these days. Eyes are bleeding.

Image by I'mBatman