1. Deeper Attention and Affection to Daily Life
of National Language

In the past, teachers did not seem to distinguish between learning and practice. This could be found in a teaching that to learn is to practice, and once you have known, you should never fail to put your knowledge into practice in your everyday life. The teaching is the very saying, “fondness of learning and faithfulness of doing(好學篤行).” One who has wholly learned and realized orders and values in the world must carry out his realization to illuminate his surroundings. Otherwise, his realization, be it ever so valuable, stops as selfish knowledge and cannot become altruistic wisdom.

The considerable surplus in economic life and the steady stability in daily life have caused quite a few changes in our inner world of life. Of these changes, a delightful aspect has been witnessed. That is the very fact of the gradual rising of cultural consciousness and the healthy stabilizing of living attitude. There are still quite a few members of our society who cannot spend money and leisure on some unhealthy items, but the number of those who are eager to learn a highly-skilled ability, much more new knowledge and information, is steadily going up.

According to this trend of society, the terms ‘social education’ and ‘life-long education’ have come into being. Thus, many institutes of social education have been established in universities and many lectures on culture and liberal arts, large or small, have been opened for an increasing number of voluntary attendants. Now, this is truly not an age in which learning is finished at schools.

It is good that the circle of those who are willing to learn and who are actually learning, is being extended. It means that our society is getting brighter and brighter. Yet it ends as vain knowledge, if one is fond only of learning and does not practice what he has learned. This could be compared to the darkness of our society in which roughness and unkindness, disorder and irrationality still prevail.

It is because of a deep-rooted habit that many people cannot properly activate a gentle and kind mind and cannot rightly practice order and rationality.

There is no one who can know our national language without understanding the meanings of such words as ‘kindness’, ‘order’, and ‘rationality’. But the fact that these words cannot live and work in real everyday life to the full, indicates that there are hardly any people who themselves practice the good intentions involved in these words. Just as ‘fondness of learning’ and ‘faithfulness of doing’ should not be separated, so the best word will become useless if we do not practice what we know. Is it not a pity, if there is any word whose power we cannot use for the development of culture?

In our present situation where we cry for Segyehwa (Globalization) and dream of substantial welfare with a higher quality of life, what we should do first is to warm and soften our own minds and hearts through a refined life of language. In order to do this, every one of us should pay more attention to our own language, and polish our own national language.

Furthermore, we should not stop at this stage and we should connect the power of words with good sense with actual practice to cultivate our life and consciousness elegantly and gracefully, little by little.