The Expansion Of Education In The Qing Dynasty Confucian Indoctrination As Ideal And Reality

Academic Paper from the year 2013 in the subject Orientalism / Sinology - Chinese / China, grade: 1,0, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, course: Late Imperial China - Culture, Politics, History, language: English, abstract: The expansion of education in China during the Qing dynasty is a topic of ambiguity. This ambiguity starts with the term ‘education’, for, in order to speak about an expansion of it in China one has to be aware of the fact that there are different forms of education and that these forms incorporate different prerequisites, applications, and goals. In Qing China, where ‘imperial Confucianism’ was established as the “absolute criterion for thought and conduct” , Confucian ideals were forced upon the people via different media, ranging from oral transmission for the illiterate to primers for boys attending elementary school to the canonized "Four Books and Five Classics" for civil service examination candidates. There could be no distinct ‘general education’ in our modern sense for all Chinese strata. Thus, the Chinese government had to employ different strategies among the range of social strata in order to achieve a dissemination of Confucian ideals with the ultimate goal of social stability. This essay discusses the different approaches to this task and the ways in which the ideals of the ruling elite were reflected in the reality of the people.

In this book, Ying Zhou argues that educational reform filled a critical role in bridging the precarious gap between democratic ideals and political realities in late Qing and Republican China, where institutional change in education and the cultivation of a qualified citizenry were two sides of the same coin in the development of democratic education. Through a multi-level analysis of the (re)arrangements of national education and teachings of citizenship, Zhou unravels the complex political and educational nexus in China between 1901–1937, where the hope of education was to bring both political modernity and social progress.

What were the content and perceived function of elementary education? How did civil service examinations represent elite educational ideals? How did the doubling in size of the late empire under Manchu rule influence the extension of education and schooling in a multiethnic political culture? The authors also examine the intellectual battles over the very meaning of "school" in China before the twentieth century.

This book argues that a major part of the Chinese government’s road map, formulated in 2017, to modernise China comprehensively by 2049 is the process of social disciplining. It contends that the Chinese state sees that modernisation and modernity encompass not only economic and political–administrative change but are also related to the organisation of society in general and the disciplining of this society and its individuals to create people with “modernised” minds and behaviour; and that, moreover, the Chinese state is aspiring to a modernity with “Chinese characteristics”. The question of modernising by disciplining was extensively dealt with in the twentieth century by leading Western social scientists including Max Weber, Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault, who argued that disciplining, extending from external coercion towards the internalisation of restraints, is indispensable for achieving social order and thereby for “civilisation” –but defined from a European perspective, in relation to developments in Europe. This book therefore not only discusses the Chinese experience of social disciplining, but also, by looking at a non-Western society, identifies universal tendencies of societal change and social disciplining and separates them from particular occurrences.

Maintaining education as a pedagogical space for human formation, this book is distinctive in looking at the crisis rather than the success of Chinese education. The editors and contributors, mostly overseas and mainland Chinese scholars, argue that modern Chinese education has been built upon a superficial and instrumental embrace of Western modernity and a fragmented appropriation of Chinese cultural heritage. They call for a rethinking and re-envisioning of Chinese education, grounded in and enriched by various cultural traditions and cross-cultural dialogues. Drawing on Chinese history and culture, Western and Chinese philosophies, curriculum and pedagogical theories, the collected volume analyzes (1) why education as person-making has failed to take root in contemporary China, (2) how the purpose of education has changed during the process of China’s modernization, and (3) what a rediscovery of the meaning of person-making implies for rethinking and re-envisioning Chinese education in the current age of globalization and social change. Re-envisioning Chinese Education: The meaning of person-making in a new age discusses among other issues: China’s Historical Encounter with the West and Modern Chinese Education Rediscover Lasting Values: Confucian Cultural Learning Models in the Twenty-first Century Rethinking and Re-envisioning Chinese Didactics: Implications from the German Didaktik Tradition The New Basic Education and the Development of Human Subjectivity: A Chinese Experience This book will be relevant for scholars, researchers, and policy makers everywhere who seek a more balanced, more sophisticated, and philosophically better grounded understanding of Chinese education.

This comprehensive survey covers the main aspects of China's educational history: schools and examination system, student movements, private academies, the relationship between state, society and education, life of intellectuals, the conventions of intellectual discourse, and the tradition of China's classical learning.

Marianne Bastid-Bruguiere's important study on the work of Zhang Jian and the educational reforms in the last years of the Qing dynasty, 1901-1912

In this groundbreaking volume, based on extensive research in Chinese archives and libraries, Jan Kiely explores the pre-Communist origins of the process of systematic thought reform or reformation (ganhua) that evolved into a key component of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary restructuring of Chinese society. Focusing on ganhua as it was employed in China’s prison system, Kiely’s thought-provoking work brings the history of this critical phenomenon to life through the stories of individuals who conceptualized, implemented, and experienced it, and he details how these techniques were subsequently adapted for broader social and political use.

The Palgrave Handbook of Citizenship and Education provides an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the current field of citizenship and education. It draws on insights from a range of disciplines to explore historical, philosophical, theological, sociological and psychological ideas on how the two concepts intersect and is international in scope, authorship and readership. Five sections provide a clear outline of: Foundational thinkers on, and the theories of, citizenship and education; Citizenship and education in national and localised contexts; Citizenship and education in transnational contexts; Youth, advocacy, citizenship and education; Contemporary insights on citizenship and education; An essential resource for scholars interested in how theorizations of citizenship, civic identity and participatory democracy are, and could be, operationalized within educational theories, educational debates, educational curricular, and pedagogic practices.

This open access book considers a pivotal era in Chinese history from a global perspective. This book’s insight into Chinese and international history offers timely and challenging perspectives on initiatives like “Chinese characteristics”, “The New Silk Road” and “One Belt, One Road” in broad historical context. Global History with Chinese Characteristics analyses the feeble state capacity of Qing China questioning the so-called “High Qing” (shèng qīng 盛清) era’s economic prosperity as the political system was set into a “power paradox” or “supremacy dilemma”. This is a new thesis introduced by the author demonstrating that interventionist states entail weak governance. Macao and Marseille as a new case study aims to compare Mediterranean and South China markets to provide new insights into both modern eras’ rising trade networks, non-official institutions and interventionist impulses of autocratic states such as China’s Qing and Spain’s Bourbon empires.