Between China And The West: Research On The Transformation Of Gentry Family Education In Suzhou Area In The Late Qing Dynasty And The Early Republic Of China

In modern social change,family education has achieved a transition from tradition to modernity.In the past studies,the importance and transformation of family education,especially the gentry family education,did not pay special attention to how the gentry family responded to the collision of Chinese and Western cultures and how they were chosen.Suzhou traditional gentry family education to the imperial examination-oriented,attention to reading test,encouraging good,focusing on self-cultivation.This kind of traditional family education has the inequality of parent and child status,narrow education content,and easy to produce false filial piety so on and so forth.With the influx of Western learning and the censorship of the imperial examinations,different levels of gentry family for different considerations,the attitude of the Chinese and Western cultures are different.In general,they face three choices,stick to tradition,completely westernized,or in-between.For the third one,it tends to either Chinese or Western style,or both.In this paper,we use the books and writings and other kinds of materials as the basis for the study.Taking Xu Zhaowei and Liu Yazi as examples,we use word frequency analysis and literature interpretation to examine their family education and try to enrich the multi-faceted gentry family education in Jiangnan area The Xu Zhaowei and Liu Yazi had similar experiences in their early time.Whereas different growth environment and life experience made their family education to show two different transformation paths.