Children Issues In Early Modern Chinese Schools:an Approach Of The Historiography Of Children

Western historical studies had gone through a big transformation since the rise of French Annales School in early20th century, leading to the emergence of social history that focuses on the daily life of ordinary people and its changes. Informed by such epoch-making movement, the French historian Philippe Aries became the first man to put the history of children onto the academic map, with the publication of his book Centuries of childhood:A social history of family life in the1960s. Almost fifty years later, western historians in this field have diverted their attention from the research on adults'conception of childhood to the research on children's own voices and their agencies as social actors. In China, however, only a few scholars make their efforts to address basic issues of the history of Chinese children, and to bring the disciplinary construction of such new field into agenda is only a recent event. Studies on adults'views of childhood have appealed to many researchers from different disciplines, but three questions remain:first, historical resources they employed are restricted to the intellectuals'works and official documents, while the discovery of the sources linked to the ideas and lives of populace is still scant; second, a "revolutionary" ideology spreads among these scholars who tend to exaggerate the unique position of "May-fourth" period in the Chinese history of children; third, research literatures on school education are still sparse. Furthermore, it maintains a virgin filed to study the lived experience of children in the past, and their influence on the reconstruction of societal culture.The research study in this dissertation is considered the first trial to make the issues aforementioned resolved. By capitalizing on the new evidences such as (auto) biography, oral historical texts, school chronicles, and through the reexamination on Chinese schooling during the time of1902-1949, the author not only investigates the conceptions on children issues of governments, intellectuals and ordinary people, to testify the hypothesis that the period of "May-fourth" is not always the time for the "discovery" of childhood in different arenas; and meanwhile reveal the actual experiences of children in the family and school, and their agencies of defending their own rights and influencing the adults'world.The dissertation is composed of three sections and eight chapters as follows: The first section naming "Children in the society and family" aims to describe the tension among the state, society, parents and children in terms of children's right to education, which is divided into two chapters:the first chapter discusses the complex relationships between children's work and their opportunities of getting educated, mainly reflecting the attitudes and reactions of the state and society when they coped with such relationships; in the second chapter, factors inside the family that facilitate or impede the accomplishment of children's right to education, and strategies children adopted to defend such right are portrayed in detail.The second section is called "Children in the school system" and attempts to present the power relations among the state, school, parents and children within the frame of school system, which includes three chapters:chapter three shows how the state and parents looked at and reacted to children's education in the process of the establishment and implementation of compulsory education system; chapter four and five document the modernization process of school management system and children's influence on such process from the perspective of discipline and self-governance.The third section "Children in curriculum and instruction" uncovers the contributions of each party to the foundation of child-centered curriculum and pedagogy. Three chapters comprise this section:chapter six and seven disclose how the evolving conception on childhood helped the state and intellectuals launch the curriculum reform in preschool, elementary and secondary education; the last chapter deploys the ideas and reactions of school practitioners and local governments as to the issues of children, and describes children's lived experience in and outside the classroom.