Recently, the old text "The Snake Catcher Says" has been on the hot search again. Many netizens still remember this old text vividly, but when they flipped through the new version of the junior high school Chinese textbook, they found that it had been quietly deleted at some point.
Liu Zongyuan's "The Snake Catcher Says", the theme comes from real life, the style is simple, the language is fluent, there are stories and opinions, the combination of facts, thought-provoking, deafening, such an article is called "a famous article through the ages", and it is not an exaggeration.
Many netizens expressed their puzzlement, why such a good ancient text was deleted? After the deletion, junior high school students no longer know how to understand the intertextual rhetoric of "shouting from the west to the east and the north from the south." They no longer know that "the king will be born with sorrow", which sentence should be used to deeply understand the use of action?
Indeed, there is a lot of classical Chinese knowledge in this old text, and if you look at it from the perspective of learning the language, you really shouldn't delete it.
So, when was this old text deleted? A rough review of the information shows that from the 1950s to the early 2000s, this ancient text has been in junior high school Chinese textbooks. After 2000, the new curriculum reform began to be implemented, and several versions of the textbooks appeared, among which the People's Education Publishing House's junior high school Chinese textbook deleted "The Snake Catcher Says", but it was still retained in many versions.
In 2012, the textbook version was updated again, and some editions may have seen that the People's Education Publishing House had deleted "The Snake Catcher Said", so they followed up in time, and since then, this old text has only existed in a few editions (such as the version of the Chinese Language Publishing House). In 2014, the "Examination Instructions" of the Beijing High School Entrance Examination was officially notified: "Shu Xiang He Poor" and "The Snake Catcher Said" were deleted from the reading articles of classical Chinese, and replaced with "There is much help for the righteous, and little help for the unjust" and "Boya Drum and Qin". Since then, "The Snake Catcher Says" has also been decoupled from the exam.
Most of the students who took the high school entrance examination in 2014 were born in 1998. In other words, in Beijing, the post-98 generation is no longer familiar with the two sentences "harsh government is fiercer than tigers" and "the poison of endowment is even more like a snake".
At that time, Xi learned this "Snake Catcher Said", and could also attach an "easter egg", that is, the explanation of Confucius's "harsh government is fiercer than a tiger" in the commentary, which tells a woman crying at the foot of Mount Tai because her father-in-law, husband, and son were eaten by tigers, and Confucius asked her, "Why don't you leave here?" The woman replied, "Because there is no harsh management here." This is the allusion to "harsh government is fiercer than a tiger". Since there is "The Snake Catcher Says", it can be said that "harsh government is fiercer than tigers, and harsh government is poisonous to snakes".
Now that it is a society under the rule of law, our policies are becoming more and more fair and humane, and we have built a civilized, harmonious, just and law-based society. However, occasionally, we still encounter some unsatisfactory things, and we often feel the weakness and helplessness of the individual. In fact, we are the same as the "Jiang family" in "The Snake Catcher Says", we don't have many choices, and if we want to survive, we have to pay a lot of money, or work overtime, or brave the wind and rain, and sometimes, we are helpless when we encounter a serious and demanding security guard. Therefore, even in today's harmonious society, "The Snake Catcher Says" will not be outdated, it will still be remembered, and when it is deleted, there will still be people who pay attention.
There are many famous stories through the ages, and you need to have life experience to empathize. I read it aloud a few times in class, but I remember it again years later and find that I have become the protagonist of the text. That's the beauty of literature. I hope that the editors of the textbook will not delete such ancient masterpieces, which is also a kind of cultural self-confidence and institutional self-confidence. "Therefore, it is said that the compiler of the textbook will be able to obtain it."