Evolution of Chinese language education
FILE PHOTOS: (Left) Two illustrated pages printed with “A Song of Holidays.” (Right) A page comparing a gym suit and a Western-style outfit from the National Language Reader for Lower Primary Schools (1906)
The history of schooling in China stretches back to the Xia Dynasty (c. 2000–1600 BCE). Before the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BCE), schools were exclusive to children of the nobility, and were divided into two types: state schools and village schools (also known as local schools). Schools after the Western Zhou Dynasty were still predominantly guanxue (official schools), including the junxue and xianxue (prefecture schools and county schools), and the taixue (the imperial academy) of the Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), the last of which evolved into guozijian (the imperial college) after the Sui Dynasty (581–619). By contrast, private schools emerged during the Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 BCE) and the Warring States Period (475–221 BCE). These private schools also became an essential part of Chinese feudal education during the Han Dynasty.
After the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), and especially during the period of “eastward dissemination of Western learning,” China began to reform and modernize its education system. Many modern schools emerged to meet requirements of the times, notably the Nan Yang Public School set up by Chinese tycoon Sheng Xuanhuai in Shanghai in 1897. Its affiliated elementary school and affiliated middle school are praised as “the beginning of public elementary schools and middle schools” in China. These modern schools altered traditional school systems with curriculum predominated by Chinese classics, ushering in an era of transition in education from classical studies to modern Chinese education.
Classics in decline
The enactment of the Gui-mao School System in 1904 officially incorporated Chinese writing and literature into Chinese language study’s modern curriculum. The government specified that both a native language course and a Chinese culture course should be taught nationwide.
After integrating the Chinese language course into the curriculum, a few issues emerged regarding the course’s theoretical studies, although debates regarding its title and purpose, as well as the teaching methodology had not yet started.
Meanwhile, modern Chinese courses oscillated between feudal education and modern methods. As a result, reforms remained shallow, and subject building had not truly begun. The Constitution of Imperial Schools issued in 1904 wrote of educational goals that education should be rooted in loyalty and filial piety, and based on the classics, so that students’ hearts will be in the right place. Students were allowed to learn from Western learning to gain wisdom and sharpen their skills. The aims were revised in 1906 into “loyalty to the throne, the veneration of Confucius, advancing public good, exalting martial spirit and an emphasis on practical use.” Apparently, in essence, feudalism still lay behind the facade of the reformed education system.
By this stage, the subject of Chinese had gradually separated itself from the basic categories of classics, history, philosophy, and ethics, and eventually became an independent subject. However, educators and reformers had not begun to study national language education from this angle, since modern pedagogy and curriculum theory had only just begun.
Although the subjects of Chinese language and Chinese literature both lacked basic elements essential to modern Chinese teaching, their frameworks still served as useful examples, which allowed scholars to review and evaluate the education system prior to the reformation. Meanwhile, Chinese theoretic studies were also in the making as an independent subject. In those days, while the truly modern system of Chinese teaching had yet to take form, the traditional education system predominated by Chinese classics was already in decline.
Towards scientific education
Curriculum provision in the late Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) had three features. First, coursework combined the values of both feudalism and modernity. The guiding principle was to have “Chinese learning for the fundamental principles, Western learning for practical use.” Second, course content was secularized and related to daily life. This is best illustrated by the standard middle school textbook compiled in the late Qing Dynasty. Third, the curriculum was designed using a scientific, or rule-based approach, a popular mindset that infiltrated all sectors of life.
Chinese language education was redesigned using a methodical, or rule-based approach, thanks to which the subject was transformed in the last decade of the Qing Dynasty, distinct from feudal education. A rule-based approach was not only adopted in formative education, but also became important when separating subject matters.
As traditional courses, including the classics, began to play a smaller role in Chinese education, rule-based educational methodology naturally became responsible for rearranging Chinese linguistic (or mother tongue) education and Chinese culture. To some extent, Chinese education’s modernization is a journey in which the Chinese culture gradually walks towards science instead of classic morality. This mindset can be seen through all links of Chinese education, including its curriculum provision and textbooks.
Modern Chinese education
In the late Qing Dynasty, the introduction of self-cultivation and Chinese language courses into curriculum accelerated the decline of Confucian classics education. As the famous Authorized School Regulation (1902) and Presented School Regulation (1904) stipulated, primary and secondary schools’ curriculum should include classes on self-cultivation, traditional Chinese classics, Chinese characters, and Chinese literature.
The increasing role of self-cultivation classes in school education to promote students’ moral development, as evidenced by the increased presence of textbooks on self-cultivation in more schools, shows that self-cultivation classes gained more prominence in moral cultivation than traditional Chinese classics classes during the late Qing Dynasty.
An increasing number of textbooks on self-cultivation and the Chinese language further catalyzed the decline of Confucian classics education. Self-cultivation textbooks in the late Qing Dynasty generally fell into three categories: one series of textbooks was for primary education, best represented by The Whole Volume of Primer (the 4th edition) in 1898, the earliest textbook on self-cultivation; another group of textbooks was designed for young women, with the most famous one being The Latest Textbook on Women’s Self-cultivation (1905) by Xie Yunxie and Chen Defen; another variant included textbooks for secondary education, which included the Self-cultivation Textbook for Middle School Classes (1907) by Cai Yuanpei, a prominent Chinese educator.
All of these textbooks on self-cultivation promoted modern ideas and moral values, marking a drastic shift from previous textbooks which emphasized Confucian classics. These modernized textbooks, together with Chinese language textbooks, began to replace the dominant instructive role of Confucian classics in curriculum design and within the Chinese educational system, accelerating the shift towards more modern perspectives in moral education.
As a result, the function of moral cultivation was increasingly undertaken by self-cultivation and Chinese language courses in school education, which gradually led to a reduction of traditional Chinese classics in education. The fact that Chinese language classes were given priority in curriculum design was based on two important considerations. First, new textbook publishers dismissed the emphasis on Confucian classics as stipulated in the Presented School Regulation, as they considered the classics pedantic and dull. They believed these texts were stifling the progress of modern education. Second, publishers were responding to market demands, where there was a general disregard for traditional Confucian classics and a strong desire for textbooks with modern content.
Courses in the new curriculum, the rise of self-cultivation and Chinese language courses, and the fall of the traditional Chinese classics courses, mirrored the transformation moral education had undergone in the late Qing Dynasty. Since the new Chinese language course was an independent subject derived from the disciplines of history, literature, philosophy, and ethics, its growth inevitably bore a resemblance to the developmental trajectory of its original disciplines. Chinese language’s independence from other disciplines fueled emerging academic reforms during the late Qing Dynasty, leading to the establishment of a modern academic system and a major curriculum reorganization.
As a significant supporter of traditional Chinese culture, Chinese language courses nevertheless deviated from the value system of traditional Chinese classics education by choosing a different method for content selection and structural organization, thus providing impetus for changes in traditional Chinese classics education.
In the context of reorganizing curriculum in the late Qing Dynasty, traditional Chinese classics courses and their inherent value systems found new life by finding a way into Chinese language courses or other newly established courses, with its contents either completely embraced, partially utilized, or renovated into newer forms. Less significant sections of Confucian classics were edited down and gradually faded into oblivion. The diminishing significance of traditional Chinese education drastically changed the orientation of China’s moral education system, resulting in a decline of rote learning and memorization characteristic of the “moral cultivation” of feudal society.
Despite its declining strength, and the stiff competition between Chinese and Western moral values, valuable elements of traditional Chinese classics made their way into new Chinese language courses. After a century of changes, the transformation of Chinese language education culminated in an epoch-making shift from traditional classics to Chinese language.
The remarkable transformation indicates that Chinese education stakeholders should learn from history, to drive better development and effective reforms by striking a balance between traditional and modern values. Intellectual and moral cultivation should optimize the combined strength of science and the humanities, and reconcile knowledge acquisition with aesthetic cultivation, because good education should be independent and learning of one’s own culture should follow the guidance of a sensible educational philosophy. Given the fundamental role of Chinese language in education, it is indispensable to strengthen Chinese education in curriculum design so as to build more cultural confidence in our own language and culture.
Wu Tingting is an associate professor from the School of Literature at Xi’an University, and Shi Jiankui is the president of Xi’an No.1 Middle School.
Edited by WENG RONG