Education: China

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.

Educational Ideals in Late Traditional China

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, opened schools for commoners on a wider scale than ever before. The line between elites and commoners could also be blurred by political turmoil. When emperors feared that heterodox popular religions were spreading, they often conflated learning with indoctrination from above. Many literati accused Wang Yangming and his followers of heterodoxy and deceiving the people.

Separate from official studies, schools of learning among literati included poetry societies, private academies, or lineages of teachings associated with local classical, medical, or state-craft traditions. Medical and statecraft traditions were tied to the teachings of a master, who bequeathed his teachings to his immediate disciples. In the absence of public schools in Ming China (1368–1644), education in lineage schools, charity and temple schools, or at home transmitted the classical or technical training needed by young men to pass local civil or military examinations or practice their local trades.

In Ming times, the "Learning of the Way" (Neo-Confucianism) tradition became an empirewide orthodoxy. Its followers created an imperial curriculum that was strengthened by the civil examinations. Although moralistic predispositions were favored in civil examinations, alternative and dissenting learning proliferated. Natural studies, particularly medical learning, was also a legitimate focus of private study when literati sought alternatives to official careers. The wider scope of civil policy questions dating from the early fifteenth century often reflected the dynasty's interest in astrology, calendrical precision, mathematical harmonics, and natural anomalies.

Learning was guided by examples of past worthies and sages and encouraged by good companions and teachers. In traditional schools, the prestige of learning led to more regimentation than many literati might have wished, but this was tempered by numerous local traditions of learning outside the state. Members of literary schools held that because literature and governing were not separate, writers should avoid religious vocabulary, colloquial phrases, or popular novels. Knowledge of numbers using the abacus in tax-related economic transactions, debates about "hot" and "cold" medical therapies to deal with epidemics, and the astronomical expertise for reform of the calendar were also widespread.

Education, Society, and Examinations

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 counties and villages for the first time.

After the Ming fell, civil examinations were reinstituted by the succeeding Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911). As before, examinations were regularly held in 140 prefectures and about 1,300 counties. Medieval examinations had been held only in the capital, while from 1000 to 1350, regular examinations only occurred in the provincial and imperial capitals. Qing emperors granted the examination system a central educational position in Chinese government and society until 1905, when the civil examinations were abolished.

Education restructured the complex relations between social status, political power, and cultural prestige. A classical education based on nontechnical moral and political theory was as suitable for selection of elites in China as humanism and a classical education were for elites in early modern Europe. The examination life, like death and taxes, became a fixture of elite education and popular culture.

Examinations represented the focal point through which imperial interests, family strategies, and individual hopes and aspirations were directed. In the absence of alternative careers of comparable social status and political prestige, the goal of becoming an official took priority. Once set in place, the civil service recruitment system achieved for education a degree of empirewide standardization and local importance unprecedented in the premodern world. Moreover, the education ethos carried over into the domains of medicine, law, fiscal policy, and military affairs.

Several centuries before Europe, the imperial Chinese state committed itself financially to supporting an empirewide school network. Despite their initial success, dynastic schools were eventually absorbed into the examination system and remained schools in name only. Because the classical curriculum was routinized, dynastic schools became way stations, or "testing centers," for students to prepare for civil examinations.

Training in both vernacular and classical literacy was left to families. Dynastic schools in China never entertained goals of mass education that the Maoists would later call for. Rulers recognized elite education based on the classics as an essential task of government to recruit talent. Chinese elites perceived a classical education as the correct measure of their moral and social worth. Both believed that ancient wisdom, properly generalized and inculcated, tempered men as leaders and prepared them for wielding political power.

Rulers and elites equated social and political order with moral and political indoctrination through education. High-minded officials also appealed for the autonomy of education as an antidote to the warping of classical goals by the cutthroat examination process. Private academies frequently became centers for dissenting views. Such academies also served as important educational venues for literati who preferred teaching and lecturing to pass on their classical learning. Compared to some five hundred Song and four hundred Yuan dynasty private academies, the Ming overall had in place from one to two thousand academies by its end. The Qing had upwards of four thousand empirewide.

Political Uses of Education

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—by special tutors selected from the civil examinations.

Imperial support of literati-inspired cultural symbols, which were defined in terms of classical learning, painting, literature, and calligraphy, enabled the dynasty in concert with its elites to maintain the institutional conditions necessary for its own survival. The examination hierarchy stabilized existing social hierarchies by redirecting wealth and power derived from commerce or military success into education to prepare for civil and military service. A by-product was the creation of a large number of classically literate elites who produced essays, poetry, stories, novels, medical treatises, and scholarly works.

Social Consequences of Education

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 competition, not to mention an unstated gender bias against all women.

Because the dynastic school system was limited to candidates already literate in classical Chinese, initial stages in training and preparing a son for the civil service became the responsibility of families seeking to attain or maintain elite status. Careerism usually won out over idealism among talented young men who occasionally were forced to choose between their social obligations to their parents and relatives and their personal aspirations. Failures could, however, because of their classical literacy, choose teaching and medicine as alternate careers.

Unlike contemporary Europe and Japan, where absolute social barriers between nobility and commoners prevented the translation of commercial wealth into elite status, landed affluence and commercial wealth during the Ming dynasty were intertwined with high educational status. Because of the literary requirements, artisans, peasants, and clerks were poorly equipped to take advantage of the openness of the civil service. Clear boundaries were also erected to demarcate male education from female upbringing, which remained intact until the seventeenth century, when education of women in elite families became more common.

Nevertheless, when compared with the fatalistic ideologies common among Buddhist or Hindu peasants in South and Southeast Asia, for example, the Chinese ideology of teaching and learning did promote beliefs in the usefulness of education and created a climate of rising expectations for those who dreamed of glory but sometimes rebelled when their hopes were repeatedly dashed.

Culture and Education

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 mature understanding was a gradual achievement that derived from mastering the literary language and its moral and historical content.

Educated men, and some women, became members of a "writing elite" whose essays would mark them as classically trained. The educated man was able to write his way to fame, fortune, and power, and even if unsuccessful in his quest for an official career, he could still publish essays, poetry, novels, medical handbooks, and other works. The limitation, control, and selection of the "writing elite," not the enlargement of the "reading public," was the dynasty's goal in selecting officials.

Local lineages translated their social and economic strength into educational success, which in turn correlated with their control of local cultural resources. Lineages required classically literate and highly placed leaders who moved easily in elite circles and could mediate on behalf of the kin group with officials. Economic surpluses produced by wealthy lineages, particularly in prosperous areas, enabled members of rich segments to receive a better classical education, which via success on state examinations allowed access to political and economic prestige outside the lineage.

Dominant lineages and merchant families maintained their local status through their schools, medical traditions, and academies. Elite education stressed classical erudition, historical knowledge, medical expertise, literary style, and poetry. The well-publicized rituals for properly writing classical Chinese included cultural paraphernalia long associated with literati culture: the writing brush, ink stick, inkstone, stone monuments, fine silk, and special paper.

Although muted in practice, elites achieved a degree of cultural and linguistic uniformity through a classical education. The classical curriculum represented a cultural repertoire of linguistic signs and conceptual categories that ensured elite political power and social status. Education in dynastic schools and private academies was a fundamental factor in determining cultural consensus and conditioning the forms of reasoning and rhetoric that prevailed in elite written texts of the period.

Reform and Revolution

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" to classical thought by declaring its moral superiority as a reward for its historical failure. The modern Chinese intellectual irrevocably replaced the late imperial literatus in the early republic.

Increasingly, traditional education was dissolved within a westernizing reformist project. Shu Xincheng (1893–1960), an early republican educator and historian, recalled the pressure of the times to change: "The changeover to a new system of education at the end of the Ch'ing appeared on the surface to be a voluntary move by educational circles, but in reality what happened was that foreign relations and domestic pressures were everywhere running up against dead ends. Unless reforms were undertaken, China would have no basis for survival. Education simply happened to be caught up in a situation in which there was no choice" (Borthwick, p. 38).

The floodgates broke wide open after the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, which was largely fought on Chinese soil. Given the frantic climate of the time, the classical educational system was a convenient scapegoat. Court and provincial officials submitted a common memorial calling for the immediate abolition of the civil examinations at all levels. The civil examinations in particular were perceived as an obstacle to new schools because a classical degree still outweighed new school degrees and prevented realizing the ideal of universal education.

A separate Education Board was established in December 1905 to administer the new schools and oversee the many semiofficial educational associations that emerged at the local and regional levels. The board reflected the increasing influence of Han Chinese officials and served the interests of the modernists in undoing the schooling mechanisms under which classical literacy and essay writing had been achieved.

Still missing, however, was the need to address the role of classical versus vernacular language in school instruction and in written examinations. Full-scale educational reform still required champions of a "literary revolution," who became vocal during the May Fourth period after 1919. Not until the republican Ministry of Education began to move on the vernacular language of education could popular education move from ideal to practical reality.

Many unofficial organizations and groups entered the fray of school reform, which eroded the Manchu court's control over education policy. Through the portal of local education, local official and unofficial elites took over the educational domains of the central bureaucracy. As the imperial court grew weaker, regional and local tiers of power began to create the educational institutions that would accelerate the demise of the dynasty and form the educational pillars of the republic after 1911.

The Education Board established in 1905 was renamed as a "ministry" in the republican period and remained on the side of new schools. The educational institutions of the Republic of China after 1911 were the direct legacy of the late imperial reforms. Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) created the examination bureau as part of the republic's 1920s "five-power constitution," which echoed traditional institutions. The twentieth-century examination life, which was associated with university and public school entrance examinations in China and later in Taiwan, is the cultural heir of the imperial examination regime.

Despite important continuities, the affinity between longstanding expectations of traditional Chinese families and the dynasty's objective political institutions was ripped apart. Increasingly reformed on Western and Japanese models, new schools in China precipitated a generalized down-classing of traditional education and the classical curriculum. Many conservative families failed to convert their inherited educational and literary cultural resources into new academic degrees for their children. A revolutionary transformation in student dispositions accompanied the radical change in the conditions of recruitment of public officials after 1905.

Reform of education and examinations in China after 1900 was tied to newly defined goals of Western-style change that superseded conservative imperial goals for reproducing dynastic power, granting gentry prestige, and affirming classical orthodoxy. The ideal of national unity replaced dynastic solidarity. The sprawling, multiethnic Manchu empire became a struggling Han Chinese republican state that was later re-fashioned as a multiethnic communist nation.

See also Chinese Thought ; Confucianism ; Examination Systems, China .

bibliography

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Benjamin A. Elman