Which Matters More: Going to School, or Reading?

This afternoon Gege asked me a question: which is more important, going to school or reading?

I told him that both are important. For you, right now, going to school is more important.

Gege quickly began to argue back. He said he already knew a lot of characters, and his teacher had told him that he now knows enough to read some books on his own. To prove it, he gave me several examples.

I said, then let me tell you what I think. Reading is of course very important. In a certain sense, it is even more important than going to school. But reading first requires knowing the characters, which is what you are doing now. Once we know the characters, we still need to analyze and understand what a book is actually saying. And after we have read it, how should we understand it? So from that angle, you are now beginning to have the ability to read on your own, but you are still learning something else: how to understand the content and meaning that writing expresses.

Later I put Gege's question to AI. AI gave a different answer. It said that going to school and reading do not really do the same thing. Going to school is an institution and an environment. What a child gets at school is not only knowledge, but also living alongside teachers and classmates, learning to discuss and cooperate, and coming into contact with many things they would not have chosen on their own. Reading, or learning in a broader sense, is something that can go on for a lifetime. So if one has to compare, going to school is very important at one stage of life, while learning itself may be the work of a whole lifetime.

The same question, and Gege, AI, and I gave three answers that were not quite the same.

At the time I didn't pursue the question further. Afterwards we took the BTS. While we were standing on the platform, Gege began studying the billboards on the wall. He noticed that different billboards carried different numbers. Some were PN2, some PN11. After looking at a few, he quickly started searching for the pattern, and even tried to predict what number the next billboard might have.

Then he asked what it meant.

I told him I thought it was a kind of numbering. A billboard carries a lot of information in itself: which station it is in, which direction, what it is near, what advertisement is on it now. Without numbers, staff would have to describe it all over again every time: such-and-such station, such-and-such side of the platform, the nth billboard counting from the front. That is a lot of trouble. If every billboard is given a number, then from then on everyone only needs to say PN2 or PN11, and they will know which billboard is being discussed.

I told Gege that this is actually a very simple kind of encoding.

I think that, in a sense, human beings are encoding every day. A name is an encoding. A metro station number is an encoding. Writing is too, of course. We compress extremely complex things in the real world into symbols that can be stored, transmitted, and recognized.

But the numbers on the BTS billboards are a little different from the language we use every day.

The purpose of an encoding like PN2 is to reduce ambiguity as much as possible. Within the same management system, PN2 should ideally always correspond to one particular billboard and nothing else. Whoever sees the number should end up finding the same thing.

Encodings in language and culture are often not like that. Take "reading," 读书 (dushu, literally "reading books").

For Gege, being able to read means, first of all, knowing enough characters to read a book through on his own.

But when I say reading is important, what I have in mind is not just reading the words out. I am thinking of how a person understands the information behind the words, how they tell fact from interpretation, how they understand why the author expressed things this way, and how they form their own judgment. The very same two characters, and we are actually decoding them in different ways.

This difference brought me back to the question Gege had asked: which is more important, going to school or reading?

I suddenly realized that in asking the question, he had already performed an act of decoding. In Chinese, 上学 (going to school) and 读书 (reading) are often used together.

We ask a child where they dushu, "read," when we actually mean where they go to school. We also say someone "read for many years," and here reading usually doesn't refer only to how many books they have read; it describes their experience of being educated.

In everyday language these meanings were compressed together long ago. But Gege pulled them apart again. Is going to school the same as reading? If I already know a lot of characters and can read a book on my own, why do I still need to go to school?

He may not yet have words like encoding and decoding to describe this process, but he has already begun to discover that a word we use every day does not necessarily have just one simple, fixed meaning.

This also helped me understand anew the answer I gave him that afternoon. When I said that, for him right now, going to school is more important, it was not because school is forever more important than reading, nor because he can't read yet.

Quite the opposite. He has already begun to enter into reading. And what school is currently helping him gain is what he needs in order to enter the next layer of reading.

After knowing the characters comes understanding. After understanding comes comparing. After comparing comes asking questions. And sometimes one also needs to know whether what one is reading is a fact, or someone else's interpretation of a fact.

A few hours earlier, he had asked me which matters more, going to school or reading. A few hours later, he was standing on a BTS platform, studying the numbers on the billboards, searching for the pattern among them, and then asking me what these symbols actually meant.

We weren't sitting in a classroom. But the learning clearly hadn't stopped.

Text: Leo, excerpted from Leo's Cultural Observations