Besides the Lantern Festival performances, there are also lanterns and snacks on the streets.
This year is different from last year. This year, the people of Kuncheng have spare money, and they no longer need the government to prepare materials. They can buy the materials themselves.
Now that the official road has been repaired, there is a daily carriage service to Cizhou, organized by the government. Of course, merchants from Cizhou will also bring their goods to Kunzhou to sell.
Starting from the seventh day of the lunar new year, the people in Kuncheng began to get busy.
They learned how to make snacks from the Gu family. Although they signed a ten-year contract and had to pay the Gu family money for those ten years, the Gu family didn't receive much. After paying the money, they could still keep a large sum for themselves.
The delicious snacks they devised themselves from these local delicacies would not be charged to the Gu family.
For example, the elderly couple who ran the noodle stall, in addition to the several flavors that Gu Jia taught them, also created their own. With this new flavor, they didn't have to pay Gu Jia. They also learned how to make fillings and sold steamed buns and fried dumplings in the morning, which were all their own income.
Gu Shouxin entrusted the lantern festival to Qian Liangduo and her sisters, while he pondered matters concerning the school.
Although Kunzhou has a small population, it still has children. His wife and daughter were right when they said that the children are the hope of their Great Zhou, and development must start from childhood.
Therefore, he recruited a group of scholars and graduates, not to run the Kunzhou official school, but for them to run the school themselves.
If many talented people emerge from the school in the future, won't that attract people from far and wide to study? Why worry about the development of Kunzhou?
However, Cai Xiaolian suggested that he should not only teach the Four Books and Five Classics, but also add other courses. We should not run a school like the schools in other prefectures; we should run one with our own characteristics.
So Gu Shouxin called his family over to discuss the initial scale of the school.
Grandma Gu's idea was that since it was all family-run anyway, we should expand it and contract a hilltop so that the teacher and students could live there.
Grandpa Gu thought Grandma Gu's suggestion was good.
Cai Xiaolian and Gu Nian thought about it and agreed that it was a good idea, but the students would no longer be just little boys waving.
Upon hearing her sister and mother's words, Gu Xin immediately understood and said, "Our school is divided into three parts. One part is for basic education, and the other part is for electives after basic education. You can choose to learn a craft or take the imperial examination route. In the basic education stage, everyone learns the same things. In the stage after basic education, some things are added to the compulsory curriculum, and some things are learned separately according to your own choices."
Her proposal was approved.
Then Grandma Xiao nudged Grandma Gu: "Old Gu, since you've already contracted a whole hill, it's all just boys and it's quite empty. Why not take in some young girls? There are plenty of girls in the residential area. They don't have much to do at home, so it would be good for them to learn something."
Grandma Gu was taken aback, then nodded: "Second son, since the Emperor has left it to you to decide, why don't we break with convention and admit some girls to our school? Although they can't take the imperial examinations, once they learn to read and write, they won't be illiterate when they grow up. If we're going to do this to our family, let's do it big."
Gu Shouxin's thinking was not outdated. He never believed that a woman's virtue lay in her lack of talent. All the children in the Gu family were literate. However, in the past year, he had visited many ordinary people's homes and discovered that there were very few literate girls. There was even a girl in the Jieyou Pavilion who was so foolish that she couldn't read and had been tricked into signing a contract of servitude.
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