Changing Society In The Late Qing Education

The introduction of the Western learning had a tremendous impact on the Confucianism-oriented educational system of late Qing Dynasty just as what the import of opium did to the political structure and the setup of the trading ports to the economic structure.The opening of the Foreign Languages School in Beijing in 1862 shook the solid foundation of the educational system.Facing the unprecedented change and with the promotion of the Central Government and "advanced" people, education for the first time took the divine task of "making the country rich and its military force efficient" and "rescuing the critical situation". However, the prerequisite is that education should first accomplish the task of self-salvation. Expecting to invigorate the empire, the late Qing Dynasty carried out the risky reform of anguish and travail.The Qing Government had formulated the educational reforming policy of adopting the system of western countries, after undergoing the Westernization Movement, the Reforming Movement and the New Deal Movement in a row. Meanwhile, the Qing government established the goal of educational reform of popularizing national education, by setting up the national administrative institution of education and enhancing educational framework of schools, along side with measures of classifying the different subjects and course set-up. Consequently, the late Qing Dynasty had gradually fulfilled the realization of the transformation from "the society of imperial examinations" to "the society of schools", from "the loose educational way" to a "national and institutional educational system", and from the "traditional Chinese knowledge system" to "modern Western knowledge system".It can be safely concluded that under the historical conditions of that time,due to the possibilities of multiple choices,education of late Qing dynasty was not actually coming to the end of its road.The introduction of western learning shook the root of the traditional Chinese learning. Although the influence was not great enough to destroy the knowledge structure and theoretical systemof "Confucianism-based" thought, the trend of learning from the western world had gradually become the mainstream of the reform in the educational systm, from which tense conflicts arose widely in the the systems of knowledge, ideas and belief. The conflicts did not only displayed as disputes between "Chinese learning" and "western learning", but fights among forces in the differentiation of traditionaly Chinese learning as well, even psychological entanglement caused by personal thought changes in different time span.In fact, the conflicts accompanied by the educational changes decided the direction and affected the tendency of the reform of education in late Qing dynasty.The purpose of this research aims at discovering the various disputes in thoughts and actions in late Qing dynasty, through which depicting the tough course of transform towards "school-oriented" educational system.