"Ten years of trees, a hundred years of people" comes from "Pipe? Quan Xiu: "A year's plan is like a tree valley; The ten-year plan is nothing more than a tree; Lifelong planning is nothing more than cultivating people. A tree gets a tree, and the valley is also; Ten wins in one tree, and wood is also; A tree is a winner, and people are also. "This passage means that for a country, the most profitable person is to cultivate talents. Once the talents are successfully trained, there will be "one tree and hundreds of things", which is a lifelong plan for the country to govern the country. Then people have always summarized this passage of Guan Zi as "it takes ten years to plant trees and a hundred years to educate people", which means "it is of great significance to train talents, and it also shows that it is not easy to train talents". But the phrase "it takes ten years to plant trees, but it takes a hundred years to cultivate people" is puzzling and may not be correct.

The pillars of the Forbidden City are all made of nanmu, which comes from the deep forests in the south. It is said that it will take four or five hundred years, and ten years is not enough. Fast-growing forests can grow into big trees in ten years. However, this kind of tree is only mixed into pulp to make paper, or to produce disposable chopsticks and the like. If we want to use them as the pillars of high-rise buildings, I'm afraid it will be difficult to grow them in ten years.

In fact, "training people for a hundred years" is also empty talk, because most people in the world will not live to 100 years old. The average life expectancy of the ancients was only 30 to 40 years old, and the modern average life expectancy is said to have reached more than 70 years old. Although there are people who can live to be over 100 years old, after all, they are a minority, and centenarians have degraded their bodies, their thinking is almost stagnant, and they can't make any contribution to society. I don't know what it means to be a tree person for a hundred years. Is it to cultivate individual old people?

When did the phrase "it takes ten years to plant trees, but it takes a hundred years to cultivate people" begin? However, this is just an empty slogan. If it is really implemented, it is impossible to get many good trees and talents. Ten years of wood is not a good wood. Really good wood, such as nanmu ebony, takes hundreds of years to become a useful wood, and the cultivation of talents is really to improve efficiency and seize the day. So as long as the method is proper, ten years is enough, and it doesn't take a long time of one hundred years.

"Educating people for a hundred years" may be understood as: training talents is a century-long plan. Although there is no big problem with this understanding, the sentence "educating people for a hundred years" is easy to produce ambiguity. Most people will interpret this sentence as: a hundred years of cultivation. In fact, Guan's original text only uses a "lifelong plan", and there is no such thing as "a hundred years". This shows that Mr Guan is actually very objective. Maybe he noticed the objective fact that ordinary people can't live to 100. The theory of "one hundred years" is obviously exaggerated and attached by later generations, but it is too outrageous and absurd, which violates the laws of science and is divorced from human reality. Perhaps it is more practical to change the formulation of "planting trees in ten years and educating people in a hundred years" to "planting trees in a hundred years and educating people in a hundred years"?

China people like to shout some false slogans, such as "it takes ten years to plant trees, but it takes a hundred years to cultivate people", which should actually be stopped.