Education in China - Educational Ideals In Late Traditional China, Education, Society, And Examinations, Political Uses Of Education
classical remained merit chinese
Since antiquity Chinese placed an inordinately high value on education. During the classical era (600–250 B.C.E.), the Chinese advanced the notion that merit and ability measured by training should take precedence over race or birth in state appointments. Since the early empire (200 B.C.E.–200 C.E.), clans and families mobilized financial and cultural resources to provide boys (and sometimes girls) with the tools of classical literacy. However, a society based on merit remained only an ideal. Through the middle empire (600–900 C.E.) education remained the privilege of landed aristocrats and prosperous merchants.
The imperial state increased its expenditures on education during the Tang (618–906) and Song (960–1280) dynasties, when it created the first examination system for selecting officials. In addition, the rise of Buddhism in medieval China created charitable institutions for the common people, which included temple schools and monasteries, where many commoners—male and female—were educated. Building on such precedents, late imperial (1400–1900) statesmen and local leaders, except for the occasional Daoist eccentric, agreed that education, particularly a classical, moral education, was one of the foundations of public order and civilized life.
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Teachers in late imperial times aimed at training a highly literate elite and socializing the far less literate, or even illiterate, common people by means of exhortations and rituals. This concept never hardened into a tidy formula, given the dissatisfactions with the educational status quo that have characterized Chinese history. Wang Yangming (1472–1529) and his followers, for example, o…
After 1000, Chinese appealed to meritocratic ideals in which social prestige and political appointment depended on written examinations to establish public credentials. Elite status was corroborated by examination, which in turn produced new literati social groups that endured from 1400 to the twentieth century. Classical learning became the empirewide examination curriculum, which reached into co…
Imperial support of education was contingent on the examinations to supply talented and loyal men for the bureaucracy to employ. Political legitimacy was an assumed by-product of preparation for the civil and military service. In a convoluted ideological canvas of loyalties encompassing state and society, even emperors became educated in the orthodox rationale for their imperial legitimacy—…
Education was premised on social distinctions between literati, peasants, artisans, and merchants in descending order of rank. Under the Ming, sons of merchants for the first time were legally permitted to take the civil examinations. However, occupational prohibitions, which extended from so-called mean peoples to all Daoist and Buddhist clergy, kept many others out of the civil service competiti…
Classical literacy—the ability to write elegant essays and poetry—was the crowning achievement for educated men and increasingly for elite women in the seventeenth century. This learning process began with rote memorization during childhood, continued with youthful reading, and concluded with mature writing. Literati believed that the memory was strongest at an early age, while matur…
During the twentieth century, classical literati values, dynastic imperial power, and elite gentry status unraveled. Manchu rulers gave up civil examinations as one of their major weapons of cultural control that had for centuries successfully induced literati acceptance of the imperial system. Traditionalists who reformed classical learning after 1898 paid a form of "symbolic compensation&…
Bastid, Marianne. Educational Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China. Translated by Paul J. Bailey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan China Center, 1988. Borthwick, Sally. Education and Social Change in China: The Beginnings of the Modern Era. Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1983. De Bary, William Theodore, and John W. Chaffee, eds. Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage. Berkel…
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