Learning the Old Ways.(Confucian education)(Brief Article)

The toddlers clad in satiny Chinese tunics don't seem to be taking the day's lesson to heart. As one 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 row breaks into tears. The speaker's mother confesses she's not even 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 the Andingmen district of 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 hope of improving one's character. In the early years of the 20th century, Chinese intellectuals blamed the system for stifling creative thought and weakening the country's ability to resist technologically advanced foreigners. After the communists took over in 1949, Confucius himself became a class enemy; for decades his works were castigated as medieval pap.

In their quest for something to believe in other than the party or money, however, Chinese have begun to rediscover the teachings of their most renowned moralist. Nationwide more than 2 million children are enrolled in programs similar to the one at Andingmen, where they learn Confucian works like the Three Character Classic and the Analects by heart. Sever-al major universities have set up degree programs in Chinese traditional culture. Confucian temples abandoned for the last half century have been spruced up and now draw crowds of students, burning incense and praying for high marks in their entrance exams. "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--and traditional means of instilling them--is not hard to explain. Chinese haven't believed in communism as an ideology for almost ...