1848 Great Qing Charcoal Burners

Chapter 26 Literacy
"Can you write tally marks?" Peng Gang asked the team leader and deputy team leader standing in front of him.

"Upright and honorable, honest and aboveboard."

Apart from Chen Sanshui, the deputy leader of Group Two, who looked completely bewildered and stood frozen in place, the other three nodded in unison, indicating that they would write it down.

"meeting."

“Write it down and let me see,” Peng Gang said, pointing to the brick-red earth in front of him.

Lu Qin, Lu Qian, and Li Qi squatted down, smoothed the uneven ground with their palms, and then used their fingers as pens to write tally marks on the ground.

Li Qi wrote the fastest, and his characters were the most beautiful and upright, with complete structure and control in every stroke. Lu Qin was slightly better, and his characters were more conventional. Lu Qian wrote the slowest and the worst.

"Not bad." Peng Gang looked at the three tally marks on the ground and nodded in satisfaction.

The literacy rate was low during the Qing Dynasty, especially in Guangxi, which was considered a cultural and educational backwater.

During the Qing Dynasty, the number of Jinshi (successful candidates in the highest imperial examinations) from Guangxi was only higher than that from Gansu and Liaodong, and more than half of the Jinshi from Guangxi came from Guilin Prefecture.

Peng Gang searched for several days, but could only find Li Qi, a promising young man who had a rudimentary understanding of literature and could read and write.

As for Lu Qin and Lu Qian, strictly speaking, they weren't recruited by Peng Gang, but rather were "inheritance" left to him by his father.

"Can you recognize all the words on this?" Peng Gang handed the rosters, which already had the first and second sets of names written on the cover, to Lu Qin and Li Qi respectively.

Lu Qian moved closer to Lu Qin to examine the group's roster together. Although Chen Sanshui couldn't understand it, he still imitated Lu Qian, pretending to move closer to Li Qi and stare at the Chinese characters on the paper that he didn't recognize.

“There are three unfamiliar characters that I can’t remember how to pronounce right now, but I recognize all the other characters,” Li Qi said truthfully.

"I can recognize about 60-70% of them," Lu Qin said.

"I can recognize about half of the characters," Lu Qian said.

“It recognizes me, but I don’t recognize it. I don’t know a single word.” Chen Sanshui shook his head very honestly.

Peng Gang was very disappointed with this result.

The names on the roster do not contain any rare characters, and a small number of the names are even considered unlucky and easy to raise.

These characters are mostly simple and commonly used characters.

Even so, no one can recognize them all.

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was full of brilliant generals, regardless of the stage, even in its later stages when it was already on its last legs.

There were still fierce generals like Li Xiucheng and Chen Yucheng who could stand alone and fight the Xiang, Huai, and Chu armies to a standstill.

What the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom lacked were capable ministers and officials who could govern well and improve people's lives.

If there is a shortage of generals, Peng Gang can still poach them from other generals in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

As for officials, especially tax officials, he either relied on the landlord class to send them to him voluntarily, or he cultivated them himself. The quality of the officials the landlord class could send to him is self-evident.

Peng Gang dislikes being controlled by others; he prefers to cultivate talent himself, even though this path is fraught with difficulties and extremely time-consuming.

The basic prerequisite for becoming an official is being literate.

Peng Gang had a plan from the beginning to teach these children to read and write.

However, they don't even have a shack to live in in Honglianping right now, and the most pressing issue is survival.

Teaching children to read and write can only be postponed for now.

“Boss, I have a question.” Li Qi looked at the arrangement of names on the roster and was puzzled.

The rosters he had seen before all had names arranged vertically, but the roster Peng Gang gave him had names arranged horizontally, from left to right, which made Li Qi very uncomfortable.

“Ask,” Peng Gang said. “Why is the employer’s roster different from the others? The others are written from top to bottom and from right to left, while the employer’s roster is written horizontally from left to right?” Li Qi voiced his question.

“Stare at the roster and try moving your eyes from left to right, then try moving them from top to bottom,” Peng Gang said.

There's a reason why left-to-right horizontal layout became the mainstream layout and the reading habit of the vast majority of people.

Moving from left to right aligns with the smoothness of visual movement, guiding the eye more naturally and reducing fatigue.

Horizontal layout is more conducive to column division and paragraph segmentation, improving information density and scanning efficiency. It is suitable for extensive reading and speed reading, and the reading efficiency is relatively higher.

Of course, vertical writing has a more traditional aesthetic and is more in line with the top-down stroke logic of Chinese characters, giving it an advantage in close reading.

At this stage, however, what Peng Gang needs is efficiency.

Peng Gang chose horizontal layout for another reason: it is more suitable for writing mathematical and physical formulas, laying the foundation for teaching these children mathematical and physical knowledge in the future.

Although he doesn't have a photographic memory and has forgotten most of what he learned in school, he can only teach these children some basic math, physics, and chemistry knowledge, but he will teach as much as he can.

"It seems that turning left and right is faster and more comfortable." Li Qi tried moving his eyes up, down, left and right, and indeed felt that moving his eyes left and right was easier than moving them up and down.

He had never noticed that there was such a trick to rolling one's eyes before.

“I can’t control how the rosters are formatted in other places, but in Honglianping, if you want to eat my food, you have to follow my rules,” Peng Gang said to Li Qi, Lu Qin, and the others.

"I'm giving you three days to match the names on the roster with the faces of your group members. Can you do that?"

Li Qi raised his head proudly and patted his chest to assure everyone that there would be no problem.

The others looked troubled. They didn't even recognize all the names, and they couldn't understand many of them. How could they match the names with the faces?
“Come, let me teach you.” Peng Gang sat cross-legged around the campfire, using the ground as paper and his hands as a pen, patiently teaching the three boys who had a little bit of education to recognize the names on the roster.

Li Qi had the best foundation and a strong learning ability. With just a little teaching from Peng Gang, Li Qi not only recognized all the characters on the second group's roster, but also all the names on the first group's roster.

The three characters in the second group's roster that Li Qi didn't recognize for a short time weren't because he didn't know them, but because he hadn't used them or written them for a long time and had temporarily forgotten them.

With a slight reminder from Peng Gang, who told Li Qi the pronunciation and meaning of the characters, Li Qi quickly regained his memory of the three characters and mastered their pronunciation and writing.

The Lu brothers' learning at the private school was intermittent, and their foundation was not very solid, so it was quite difficult for Peng Gang to teach them.

After patiently teaching for three or four hours, the Lu brothers only learned eight or nine more characters. Many of the characters they knew when they were first taught were forgotten by Peng Gang after only a quarter of an hour or two.

As for Chen Sanshui, he could only stand aside, staring blankly, as if listening to a celestial being reciting a heavenly book, completely bewildered and not understanding.

When Peng Gang turned his head to look at Chen Sanshui, he suddenly noticed that Zhang Ze was also hiding behind him, staring wide-eyed and listening to the lecture in silence.

Zhang Ze was clever and eloquent, and Peng Gang quite liked him. He asked curiously, "Zhang Ze, how many characters do you know? Write them down for me to see."

Zhang Ze quickly sat down, smoothed the ground, and started writing and drawing on it as he thought.

Zhang, Ze, Yi, Er, San, Liu, Da, Xiao, Niu, Shui, Huo, Zi, Wang, Wei, Ding, Biao, Tu, Gou, Tian.

He racked his brains to write these words on the ground, but when he tried to write more, his mind was completely blank and he couldn't come up with anything.

Except for the character "彪" (Biao), which has relatively complex strokes and Zhang Ze only drew its approximate shape based on memory and feeling, the other characters, although not neat and crooked, were still written correctly.

Zhang Ze's name was taught to him by Peng Gang when he was with Peng Gang. It's surprising that the kid was so dedicated and remembered it so quickly.

The remaining seventeen characters were learned on the spot. Excluding the misspelled character "彪", Zhang Ze mastered a full sixteen characters in this lesson.

Li Qi, who was always quite proud, looked at Zhang Ze in great surprise.

During dinner just now, this kid really didn't boast to him. If he had the opportunity to attend a private school, Zhang Ze would indeed be very talented in terms of literacy alone, and wouldn't be any worse than Li Qi.

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(End of this chapter)