Before the New Year, by an indoor swimming pool, I heard a retiree make remarks about the types of education to a dutiful middle-aged man to assist in enlightening the latter’s teenage son. “There are four types of education,” started the old man. “The first is family education. Second, school education. Third, society education. And the fourth? Take a guess. It’s religious education!”
　　The retiree then went on to explain how necessary and important religious education is to this country. Other swimmers seemed to agree with his view. One nodded his head, the other responded, “You’re absolutely right. Now the question is how.” The old man said, “I don’t bother to think about how. Where there is a need, there is a way.”
　　If those guys had carried on the discussion, they would have found more terms to define and more questions to answer. For instance, what is religion? If I raise the question to 10 persons, I may get 10 different answers. In the long history of China, religion has never been the principal part of the culture, and there has never been a state religion, though the world’s major religions have all found their respective versions on this soil for centuries.
　　Religion had once been regarded as something nonessential and even unwelcome in this country. During the 1960s, for example, it was on a par with superstition, or labeled as an antiscience heresy. What had been frequently cited as the standard definition of religion was Karl Marx’s famous remark that religion “is the opium of the people.” One of my schoolteachers told me that China “doesn’t need religion. It needs science and technology.”
　　Marx’s remark is scarcely heard these days, and many say they need both science and religion. They may not fully understand various religious doctrines. And I don’t think they intend to build more cathedrals, monasteries, churches or mosques, and train more clergymen. They want religion simply because they regard it as a huge source of moral strength and a way to cope with what is known as grinding spiritual impoverishment.
　　When the Chinese say religious education is a must, they are unlikely to mean that schools should teach Genesis or Buddhist samsara or the latest concept of intelligent design. The education they want is an ethical one based on religious instructions. They try to employ religion as a beachhead to push back the jungle of something dishonest, vicious or pestilential. With the injection of the religious elements into the Chinese secular society, they hope relationships among neighbors, colleagues, villagers and different groups will become more harmonious and amicable.
　　The present social setting is this. Against China’s fast economic development, people’s ethical quality as a whole seems to be stagnant and even on the decline. Money worship prevails, turning many into greedy and selfish persons buckled by profits. Moral landscape is polluted and part of society is saturated by promptings to degeneracy. Criminal offenses are on the rise. The younger generation is thought to be anemic in social obligations. While good citizenship seems far from being dominating, this nation is rightly alarmed by the steady spread of egoism and corruption.
　　Two months ago Beijing residents were completely bowled over by the news that a teenage girl was beaten to death by a conductress on board a bus. The conductress accused the schoolgirl of underpaying her fares, resulting in an argument. The woman then madly squeezed the girl’s throat till she fell into a dead faint. That poor girl died in a local hospital later.
　　The tragedy serves as a dismaying reminder of what diminished signs of civility we don’t want to see. It becomes even more prominent as the government and media are encouraging harmony among people. The incident also strongly supports an assessment by many Chinese that this fast-transforming society is short of compassion and love. And one of the remedies for healing that social illness is that China should introduce a religious education. Both Buddhism and Christianity, the two major religions in this country, advocate love and compassion.
　　That’s worth a wary try. It is widely believed worldwide that religion may make people wise and virtuous. English physician and writer Thomas Fuller (1654-1734) held that “nature teaches us to love our friends, but religion [teaches us to love] our enemies.” Indian spiritual leader Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948) once said, “It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion.” Then it’s logical to conclude that a person who is cultivated with religion may at least show his or her compassion and love to strangers. If Chinese residents are educated this way, there will be fewer dog-eating-dog tragedies or fratricides, like the bus incident mentioned above.
　　But a new question appears. If you want people to help and love each other, you don’t have to write out an “exotic prescription”―foreign religious or ethical tenets―to cure Chinese moral diseases. Chinese culture is rich in standards and precepts with reference to virtues and demeanors. An old Chinese saying, for example, goes: “Love of the people and kindness to neighboring countries―these are the treasures of a nation.” And the virtue of respecting the old and caring for the young is almost as old as the Chinese culture itself.
　　So, what vexes us is not so much a moral decline as a crisis in conviction. There is no lack of moral criteria and codes of conduct in China, but numbers of people just don’t believe in them, or they don’t bother to follow those rules. Then, what causes the belief crisis? There might be sundry reasons for that. But an impotent education obviously accounts for the problem.
　　It seems we have a chicken-and-egg problem here. One may argue that the moral decline, the belief crisis and the inefficient education are all interacting as both cause and effect. But the point is that education is the key to the chain of problems. To clean and mend the contaminated moral landscape, a religious education may be necessary as a supplement to a comprehensive educational campaign that is imperative for China. From a long-term point of view, education will turn out to be the only sure means to turn all the citizens of the world into civilized Earth inhabitants.

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