How would a parochial-school principal feel if we told him: "Within one or two generations, there will be no more Catholic schools." Well, that's what happened to Confucian education. And the Chinese did most of the phasing out of their native culture, because they were painfully aware that it made them the sick man of Asia.

There was an educational reformer named Liang Shuming who taught at Beijing University in the Twenties. He tried to set up a network of Confucian schools, thinking they would help the cause of cultural self-determination. He looked to such schools to instill values that would help the Chinese resist the power of Japanese-imported commodities. Such commodities were beginning to dominate their economy. Of course, Chinese business interests were in cahoots with Japanese who lived in the foreign concessions of Shanghai and other cities. The cozy relation between Chinese businessmen and Japanese expansion lasted right up to the war broke out.

There were also self-help schools started by Wang Fengyi and other advocates of the self-help education movement. And there was a religious teacher named Xiao Changming who took the Confucian virtues as commandments. He was known for starting rehabilitation farms for paupers and opium addicts. There was also the Buddhist-oriented Red Sauvastika Society, which ran free middle schools for children of poor families. My spiritual teacher, Lee Yu-chieh, founded temples, lecture halls and service organizations in Taiwan. In Chinese the men who started these enterprises were called shan-ren, i.e. philanthropists with no personal wealth, who had only their sweat to give. Men like Wang Fengyi, Liang Shuming, and Xiao Changming could have assumed the stature of Mahatma Ghandi in their own nation, if only the national discourse had cared to make such models of them. But unfortunately the national discourse in China fell heavily on the side of politics. [In this contrast I see once again the admirable qualities of the East Indian people.]

Mao Zedong could have incorporated such Confucian self-help schools into his mixture, but he wanted no part of them. His movement was fighting for its life, and politics was the weapon. He shouted down Liang Shuming at conferences when the issue of education was raised. At least he respected Liang enough not to have him killed, but the Confucian self-help schools withered away. Education got no chance to do its work: in the end it took invasion and war for China to shake off the economic grip of Japan.

I went to a Native American powwow here at Evergreen college. The grand entry was very stirring. I saw faces that I don't see every day on the streets in Seattle, the faces of full or half-blooded Indian survivors. Wonderful faces. I wish I knew more of their stories. Now it takes the poetic souls to dream of the richness that could have been, if only cultures had been allowed to grow up together. Don't ever let anyone tell us that the poet's vocation is not important. We still need to dream up the folkways and life-paths that could have been. Your imagination and sympathies have been invested in a very good way. In the next generation it will be hard to have such a mixture.