"Do Not Forget Your Are A Chinese"

Qian Mu(1895-1990), old name Qian En-reng with a courtesy name Binsi, was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. After uncompleted middle school education, Qian Mu worked as a teacher in the elementary school from spring1912to autumn1922, and later in the middle school for eight years. In the autumn of1930, Qian Mu moved northward to Beijing to work as a university teacher in Yanching University and later in several other universities in China, such as Beijing University, Tsinghua University, The National Southwest Associated University and Jiangnan University. In1949, Qian Mu moved southward to Hong Kong and established New Asia College there. After New Asia College was merged into The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Qian Mu resigned as president of New Asia College in1965. In October1967, Qian Mu migrated to Taibei and was soon employed as a teacher in the Institute of History, College of Chinese Culture. Qian Mu gave his last lesson marking the end of his teaching career in his home Sushulou in the afternoon of June9,1986. On August30,1990, the master deceased in his house without any disease.According to Qian Mu, culture is the soul of a nation and the later exists because of its culture. As such, saving a nation means to a large extent saving its culture. At a time when many Chinese lost confidence in their national culture and advocated for wholesale westernization, Qian Mu, after comparing Chinese and western culture, pointed out that Chinese culture is as outstanding and distinct as the western one. Since the unique soul of Chinese culture lies in its moral spirit, a general and eternal trait of its own, revitalizing Chinese culture shall be based on revitalizing the traditional values of Chinese culture. To fulfill such a mission, it is fundamental to improve education.Qian Mu believed that only "those talented people who truly love their motherland and nation and willingly devote themselves to serving their motherland" could take on the great mission of transferring and spreading traditional Chinese culture. As a standard to achieve the goal for education, Qian Mu further distinguished the phase "talented people" into two categories, namely "people""who truly love their motherland" and "the talented""who willingly devote themselves to serving their motherland". As for the term "people", Qian Mu put it into three levels, namely being people, being Chinese people and being universal people. As for the term "the talented", Qian Mu also defined it with three defining conditions, namely "all-round talented" is better than "specialized talented";"being useful to the society" is important than "for the society to use"; social science talents are more useful than science talents. According to Qian Mu, since "people" are fundamental and "the talented" incidental, we shall emphasis on the fundamental "people" instead of the incidental "talented".To achieve the goal for education, Qian Mu developed his thoughts on curriculum designing, which includes:curriculum of traditional Chinese culture based on language, history and geography; general curriculum about traditional Chinese culture,"priority being given to compulsory curriculum and optional curriculum as their complement" and;"to extend from the classroom to the fields and from fields to the wild world." The first three kinds of curriculum are manifest curriculum, and the last one is hidden curriculum. The first two kinds of manifest curriculum are compulsory general curriculum and the third one is about specialized optional curriculum. Among these categories, Qian Mu believed that hidden curriculum should be more important than manifest curriculum, and that general curriculum should be more important than specialized curriculum.To sum up Qian Mu's thoughts on education methodology, we can divide it into two large categories:methods on teaching and methods on study. While his discussion on teacher Tao can be put into the first category, his discussion on temper and study can be put into category two. On educational methodology, Qian Mu focused on training the students on their spirit and methods of self study.The most prominent problem in education in Qian Mu's age was wholesale westernized education, for which he thought that such education should be replaced by Confucian humanitsm education, a kind of education based on the traditional Chinese education. If putting Qian Mu in the long history of Chinese education development, we can see that:first, Qian Mu is a patriotic educator with strong national consciousness; second, it is respectable for Qian Mu to have determined to restore traditional Chinese educational philosophy and; last but not the least, contribution of Qian Mu to the creation of the architecture of Chinese education science shall encourage his followers to achieve more.