The Evolution of Liberal Education in China: A Historical Perspective
Introduction
The concept of liberal education has seen varied interpretations and implementations throughout history, both in the West and in China. While the United States grapples with pressures to make education more directly tied to the workplace, China is experiencing a resurgence of interest in liberal education. This article explores the historical trajectory of liberal education in China, examining its roots, transformations, and contemporary challenges.
Ancient Roots and Confucianism
The history of higher education in China can be traced back to the Shang dynasty (c. 1600 BC- c. 1045 BC). The education system in ancient China was highly elitist and centered around Confucianism, a form of humanism. Even before Confucius, the “six arts” (ritual, music, archery, chariot riding, penmanship, and arithmetic) had already acquired lofty prestige. Under the imperial examination system, the education system focused on training and selection of civil servants.
Confucianism served as the bedrock of educational practice from its inception about twenty-five hundred years ago through the late nineteenth century. Master teachers have long seen their task as more than transmitting knowledge, placing a premium on character formation and enlightenment through life.
Modernization and Western Influence
When China was defeated by Britain in the Opium War (1839-1942), liberal intellectuals in China began to reflect on Western knowledge and technology, which stimulated reforms towards modern education systems. As the Nationalists, later known as Kuomintang (KMT), overthrew the Chinese monarchy and established a republic in the 1911 Revolution, the Nationalists and liberal intellectuals listed education and industrialisation as two priorities of the new republic.
Influenced by the theory of John Dewey, Cai Yuanpei, the first Minister of Education of the new republic, believed that education should aim for growing intelligence of mind, personal traits that contribute to culture and society, democratic mobility and educational growth. He planned to put the education under autonomous, non-partisan, non-state organisations of educators, which contradicted the ideology of Nationalists, leading to a failure of Cai's reform plan. Despite the reforms, the stress on politics, law and humanities continued in the education system, suggesting that people continued to consider education as a way to get into civil service.
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As the Nationalists regained control over the government in 1928, it started to exert more influence over the education system. All higher education institutions were required to register and be certified by the Ministry of Education. Religious proselytising became forbidden, while universities were required to teach Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People, the state ideology. In addition, it established a network of national universities and managed to get more students enrolled in engineering and basic science programmes to meet the need of national development.
Epitomized by Peking University and Tsinghua University, modern Chinese establishments of higher education in the early twentieth century adopted their overall models from Western industrialized nations, but made a point to cultivate their own humanist curricula.
The Soviet Influence and Reorganization
With the Communist victory in the civil war in 1949, the new government vowed to build a "national, scientific, popular education", planning to replace the old education system, taught content and pedagogy. At first, the government promised to protect private education and took a gradual approach for the transformation in its first national meeting with education sectors in January 1950, as the Communists were clear that the universities were where they could get support from. Nevertheless, intellectuals at the universities were mostly influenced by American education and culture, and despite dissent towards the Nationalist government, they were also cautious about the Communists, holding a "wait-and-see" attitude.
Eventually, the Chinese involvement in the Korean War in October changed the expectation of the government, which became less tolerant with intellectuals' noncooperation. In the First National Education Work Conference in December 1949, the government proposed its three key policies. First, higher education must serve national construction, especially economic construction. Second, higher education should be open to workers and peasants and they should be tuition-free at national universities. Third, higher education must transit into a planned economy. In particular, the Communist government stressed the ideological basis of the education, which differed education in the People's Republic from that in the past.
Between 1949 and 1952, despite various suggestions from Chinese scholars to adapt higher education systems to a socialist society, the government decided to reorganise the education system to model after that of the Soviet Union. In 1952, the reorganization of higher education institutions was a national policy under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to adopt Soviet-styled higher education. 126 Soviet experts were sent to China for consultation regarding all aspects of higher education. RUC was the first university in China to teach and write textbooks about Marxism and Maoism. After the 1952 reorganisation, RUC became a flagship in Chinese higher education, attracting experts from all over the country to listen to the courses by Soviet experts on the campus.
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This policy focused more on engineering education and technical training while removing American influences among Chinese scholars. While eliminating private education, especially missionary higher education, the policy led to the state control over the higher education sector and the loss of faculty governance tradition since the 1920s.
Under the new education system. all higher education institutions were run by the government. The universities were further divided into three types, which include a limited number of comprehensive universities and multiple-discipline engineering universities, while most universities were single-discipline technical colleges. Academic departments became under direct affiliation of the university rather than a multi-department college. The Party leadership became part of the university organisation, while political education became mandatory.
Meanwhile, as humanities were considered to "be characteristic of bourgeoisie", relevant academic departments and their course offerings were cancelled. One of the reasons for the reorganisation was geographic imbalance of higher education, which gravitated in major cities in coastal China, such as Beijing and Shanghai. During the reorganisation, relocation of the faculty, student bodies and the facilities occurred not only across higher education institutions but also across geography.
Reform and Opening Up
After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a Soviet-style system of higher education centered on vocational and technical expertise prevailed. And with this system’s implementation, calls for the provision of well-trained manpower for industrialization and the production of new cohorts of socialist youth also became germane and prominent in China. Despite a nationwide suspension during the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, this system remained paramount until the turn of 1980s, when China commenced Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening Up.” Varying institutions then started merging to create universities where the humanities attempted again to play a role.
Contemporary Resurgence and Challenges
Since the 1990s, science and technology have been generally accepted as primary forces to deliver productivity. Yet as human-centered goals for undergraduates have gained sway in Chinese higher education (for example, becoming “persons of quality” and “well-rounded citizens”), there has also been a growing interest in investing in the liberal arts as a compelling resource to understand, guide, and critically engage the unfolding social changes and global momentum.
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The ongoing conversations following lectures inspire to think that thoughtful inquiry might enable to overcome more of blindness to one another and to the problems we share. In contrast to the continued decline of liberal arts education in the US, there has been a revived interest in liberal arts education in Asian countries in recent years. Grounded in a comprehensive understanding of the central tenets of liberal arts education in the West, Asian countries face struggles in their exploration of liberal arts education and provides a direction for Asian countries in their efforts to practice liberal arts education.
ShanghaiTech University seized a unique moment to launch its vision and programs by answering the call for intensifying scientific and technological research, and for nurturing talents in the interest of innovation. The university's undergraduate education receives its inspiration from the whole-person approach that goes beyond mere career preparations. STEM programs and HASS programs (humanities, arts, and social sciences) are arranged so that they mutually reinforce and are organically encompassed in the university’s comprehensive curriculum.
As we explore effective measures to grow liberal arts at ShanghaiTech, we face several challenges. For instance, how do we create a liberal arts curriculum within a technology-focused university that has a mandate from the Chinese Ministry of Education to limit the number of credit hours? There are also complexities of a social nature. Despite the widening endorsement of college-level liberal arts education, much of China’s current secondary teaching is still heavily focused on performance on the national college entrance examination, which represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the social trajectory for many students, especially those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
To address these impediments, we have taken on the task of reducing the number of required classes at ShanghaiTech, thus yielding more room for student options. Undergraduate programs give particular weight to a “broadly based and in-depth” pedagogical framework, tending toward interdisciplinary course planning, small class sizes, as well as interaction and openness in learning. More recently, we have also revamped our English program to infuse language education with other gen ed components in the humanities, so that students may, for instance, read Shakespeare and nineteenth-century American authors in the untranslated original.
Key Elements of Contemporary Liberal Education in China
Based on a lecture at Peking University, the concepts of Liberate, Animate, Cooperate, Instigate/Innovate can be used to describe liberal education.
With “Liberate,” it can be talked about ideas about education that led to the founding the University of Virginia. Education would liberate from what Kant had called “self-imposed immaturity.” Students should discover what they are going to do through education - not sign up to be trained in a vocation before they know who they might be and what they might be able to accomplish.
With “Animate,” it can be turned to the notion that education is setting souls aflame. Routinized education is a form of corruption, and it is urged to throw off the shackles of imitation that had become so prominent in colleges and universities. Colleges serve us when they aim not to drill students in rote learning but to help them tap into their creativity so that they can animate their world.
With “Cooperate” it can be talked about three American thinkers associated with pragmatism: William James, Jane Addams and John Dewey. Liberal education isn’t about studying things that have no immediate use. It is about creating habits of action that grow out of a spirit of broad inquiry. Addams allows to see how “critical thinking” can be overrated in discussions of liberal education. We need to learn how to find what makes things work well and not just how to point out that they don’t live up to expectations. For Addams, compassion, memory and fidelity are central aspects of how understanding should function within a context of community. For Dewey, no disciplines were intrinsically part of liberal education. The contextual and conceptual dimensions of robust inquiry made a subject (any subject) part of liberal learning.
Under the rubric, “Instigate/Innovate.” it can be referred to remarks on how liberal education at the university level should incite doubt and challenge the prevailing consensus. That is key to the power of liberal education today: instigating doubt that will in turn spur innovation. We need not just new apps to play with, but new strategies for dealing with fundamental economic, ecological and social problems.
Cosmopolitanism and the Future of Liberal Education
This paper establishes the deep connections between humanistic approaches of the Confucian tradition and liberal arts education by pointing to a common ground for the education of humanity. Ultimately, the purpose of liberal arts education, in the East as well as in the West, should be the liberation of human beings from the constraints of ignorance, prejudice and traditional customs and through the cultivation of a cosmopolitan morality that emphasizes unity, solidarity and the fusion of humankind.
Over the millennia of human growth, nations and ethnic groups gave birth to local civilizations with particular characters and distinctions, and together they also created the global human civilization in all its splendid richness and diversity. It is by the strength of this global vision that our college students are making discoveries about common values and participating in the creation of a shared human destiny. Technological advances, such as artificial intelligence, will no doubt transform the makeup of the human enterprise by drastically modifying, if not totally replacing, our physical and mental access to the goals we want to accomplish. What is to become the next chapter of this ancient and young civilization of ours? The wisdoms yielded by humanist achievements so far certainly keep us grounded regarding a future of gripping uncertainties.
tags: #liberal #education #in #China #history
