Hu Ma Returns to Tang Dynasty

Just came from Lingaoqun. Historically, conquering a vast land requires connecting small fortresses. This is how Maozi conquered Siberia. In the past, when there was no Suez Canal, there were relay small castles, garrison and commercial stations in the middle connecting channel. If we add some beacons in the middle and improve the use of visual telegraphy, it will be the information dissemination route. The upper limit of ancient ruled territory depended on communication and transportation. Visual telegraph (Chapp telegraph, optical telegraph) in France during the Napoleonic era, The picture below is the final improved version of the British visual telegraph three-arm system. The pinnacle of the beacon tower - visual telegraph When Napoleon returned, it only took more than an hour for the message to reach Paris from the border. It was with the help of France's visual telegraph at that time Originally, the message required a ferry to travel from the Yangtze River, but now it only needs to be viewed from a distance. The beacon towers of the Ming Dynasty already have simple numbers, such as double lights and double cannons, etc., Such as expressing whether the enemy is coming from the north, whether there are more than 10,000 people, etc., But they can only express very limited military content agreed in advance, and cannot express various situations like telegraphs (the only thing agreed in advance is the code). The simplest visual telegraph is the three-arm system that was later improved by the British. It is three rotatable beams on the mast, one unit every 45 degrees, which is enough to express 10 numbers, 26 letters and some common phrases. It can express about four hundred combinations. However, after the British improved it, the Morse telegraph came out. The visual telegraph was usually used for commercial purposes, and France was profitable that year. In fact, it can include financial remittances and even transactions, but cryptography personnel must be trained. In addition to the telegraph standard code, finance and the military must consider translating the telegraph code into ciphers. The financial settlement system based on remote communication brings greater benefits and changes. The visual telegraph and the modern post office system can be used to improve the original beacon towers and inns. Chinese mainly considers the issue of encoding. You can learn from modern telegraphs (telegrams were in foreign languages when they first came in), express them with four digits, and encode common Chinese characters one by one. The nearly 10,000 capacity can accommodate thousands of Chinese characters and symbols For example, A to B carry To purchase goods with 100 silver dollars, B goes to A with 105 yuan. If using bills, all it takes is a bank account transfer, and the difference in inter-bank transportation is 5 yuan. In fact, due to the huge transaction volume, there is no need to balance each transaction. For example, at the end of the year, the difference for each transaction is very small. Moreover, the utilization rate of funds has been improved. In the past, funds were required for departure, but now it only needs funds in the account at the time of transaction (that is, the waiting time for fund transfer based on remote communication). Even if there is something like a central reserve bank, the settlement of a large amount of funds will be nothing more than moving the gold and silver in the reserve from one room to another room Chinese mainly considers encoding issues. You can learn modern telegraphs (telegrams were in foreign languages ​​when they first came in), express them with four digits, and encode common Chinese characters one by one. The capacity of nearly 10,000 can accommodate thousands of Chinese characters and symbols.

The troops marched to improve literacy, and the phonetic symbols on the backs of the soldiers were pinyin as there was no pinyin at that time. In the early days of the literacy movement, the literacy method popular in the army was called the "three-five teaching method", which meant teaching three to five new words a day. This sounds easy, right? But the effect is not good. If you think about it, most of the soldiers in the army at that time had zero basic knowledge. No matter how many words you taught them in a day, they could only memorize them by rote. The final result was often that they were overjoyed, memorizing and forgetting. It's the same reason that many of us now get stuck on the first page when memorizing words. What to do? A man named Qi Jianhua developed a "quick literacy method". He was a cultural officer in the Southwest Military Region of the People's Liberation Army. His main task at that time was to educate the officers and soldiers and help them get rid of illiteracy. Qi Jianhua carefully screened 1,200 commonly used Chinese characters and labeled them with "phonetic letters." You may be unfamiliar with the word "phonetic letters," but you can think of it as the predecessor of the Chinese pinyin we are familiar with today. I have included a phonetic alphabet of Chinese characters in the manuscript. If you are interested, you can take a look. You know, when Qi Jianhua taught the soldiers literacy, the Latin alphabet pinyin scheme we use today had not yet been formulated. Qi Jianhua first taught the phonetic alphabet, then the spelling rules, and then used the phonetic alphabet as an auxiliary tool to teach the soldiers common words, which greatly improved the efficiency. How effective is this method? Using this method, the soldiers can learn about one or two hundred words a day. Compared with the previous method of only learning three or five words a day, the efficiency is improved dozens of times. Moreover, once you learn the phonetic alphabet of Chinese characters, you can also look up the dictionary and spell out the pronunciation of a character you don't recognize. This method is so easy to use that it quickly became popular. First, it spread from Qi Jianhua's troops to the Southwest Military Region, and then to the Guizhou Military Region and the Central and South Military Region. After being successfully verified in these places, it was further extended to workers and farmers. Under such promotion, in just over a year, nearly 1 million employees and 3.08 Million farmers were eliminated from illiteracy nationwide. It sounds like the literacy movement has found a good solution. But soon people discovered that although this method worked well in the army, it gradually encountered bottlenecks after going deep into the countryside. The learning effect in rural areas is not stable. If you think about it, the main components of the army are young and strong young men, and these young men stay in one place for many years. The intensity of learning and the testing of learning effects during literacy can be guaranteed. But what about in a real folk environment? Even if all the villagers in a village are illiterate, they still have children and elderly people. The age gap is huge, and the gap in learning ability is huge. Moreover, villagers still have to do farm work and cannot concentrate on studying away from work, making it difficult to consolidate their learning achievements. In order to solve the literacy problem in rural areas, the teaching methods have been iterated again. Since the problem occurs in rural areas, we might as well let rural people create their own methods and see if there are any creative solutions. As a result, a more effective method was found. For example, Gaojialiugou Village, Junan County, Shandong Province, is a small village with only 300 households. In the early days of liberation, only 9 people in the village were literate. The low level of education has brought a lot of trouble to the normal operation of this village. At that time, this village was still implementing a work-point system, which meant that wages were paid based on how much work a person did and how many work points were recorded. But because almost the entire village is illiterate, there is no unified writing standard for recording work points, so when it comes to settling the accounts, it will naturally be a mess. Because of this problem, the cooperative in the village almost couldn't survive. What to do? At that time, the village's Youth League branch established a literacy class. The teaching content of the class is also very interesting. It does not simply teach the villagers literacy, but "learn what they do". The teaching content is all related to names, place names, farm work, farm tools, livestock, etc. In two and a half months, most of the 115 young people in the village who participated in the study were able to keep track of their own work accounts. In other words, these villagers also solved their own practical problems in the process of literacy. Moreover, those teenagers with strong learning ability first learn to read, and then in turn teach adults who have been illiterate for half their lives. In this way, the problem of lack of teachers in the literacy project is also solved. After the successful experiment in Gaojialiugou Village, these creative teaching experiences were extended to other rural areas, and the literacy movement ushered in another wave of enthusiasm. However, the problem comes again. As you can tell, the literacy project we just introduced was a temporary solution to solve the lack of talent in the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China. However, if a country wants to completely eliminate illiteracy and cure the root cause, it also needs a basic education system. This is the third iteration of the Literacy Movement.