Why

While thinking of interesting books to boost up the general knowledge of our school children, a series that I read as a primary school student flashes through my mind.

It is A Hundred Thousands of Why (十萬個為什麼).

The origin of this book is in itself remarkable. The first book of the same title was actually written in Russian (Сто тысяч почему) by a Soviet author M. Ilyin (Ильин) in 1929; the idea of this title apparently rooted from Rudyard Kipling's poem Six Honest Serving Men.

Ilyin himself had very little ambition. All he wished to do was to put up a little book for Russian children to raise their interest in art and science by asking simple questions on common daily observations. When the book arrived the communism China, its exceptional potential was foreseen. The Children's Publishing House (少年兒童出版社) expand the tiny volume of Ilyin, which only had no more than 100 entries, to a series of 8 volumes and 1484 entries. It was first published in 1962.

And the rest is history. The entire series was huge success - there are nowadays versions for kids and even toddlers, not to say another several dozens of clumsy mimics.

PS. The series that I used was the second edition, published in 1965, with 15 volumes and around 3000 entries.

PPS. An excellent lesson I learnt from this very series was to be critical and paranoid with your source of information. There were no short of slogans and advertisement of communism throughout the volumes, and a considerable amount of information described was obviously wrong - as long as you open your eyes (and your mind) to look around, and exercise a tiny bit of common sense.