A Study Of Rural Vocational Education During The Period Of The Republic Of China

Since vocational education is one of the effective ways to crack “problemsconcerning agriculture, rural areas and farmers”, there is the necessity to look back uponits history when we are considering this issue. However, researches in this field are scarce,thus this dissertation intends to give an analyses on agricultural school education(hereinafter referred to as “agricultural education” for short), the most important elementin the rural vocational education system in the period of the Republic of China.The author gives an analysis of modern vocational education from three dimensions:the significance, the purpose and the scope, finding that the connotation of modernvocational education has two levels：”the ideal” and “the reality”. The author holds thatthe understanding of modern vocational education should be based on the realityprinciple, thereafter, deduce the connotation of the modern rural vocational education.Rural vocational education is for rural areas, thus agricultural education is its major part,and vocational school education is the most important form. Therefore, the content of thedissertation is agricultural education in four types of the vocational education, andvocational school education in the three forms of the vocational education, namely, thegist of the dissertation: a study of Rural Vocational Education during the period of theRepublic of China——based on the analysis of Agricultural Education.The author divides the development of agricultural education within the scope of thestudy into four stages: the period ruled by the Northern Warlord Government, the periodof fightings among warlords, the period of the Nanjing National Government, and theperiod from Anti-Japanese War to the Civil War. The author also recounts thedevelopment of agricultural education in the late Qing Dynasty in order to give a fullpicture. For each stage, there are five aspects to tackle: the founding and revision ofagricultural schools, the curriculum and the teaching materials of agricultural schools, theteachers of agricultural schools, the funding of agricultural schools, and agriculturalschools and their students. Through a comparison between these stages, the authorindicates the differences and similarities, and then gives some comments andinterpretations in the hope of providing some help to later researchers.Chapter Ⅰ deals with “Guichou Educational System” in late Qing Dynasty, which isbelieved to be most time-honored, but doesn’t necessarily fall into the category ofagricultural education. There was no discontinuity between the primary and secondary agricultural academies. All the courses offered were relatively localized, all classicliterature reading lessons were excluded. Late Qing Dynasty employed three measures tofoster agricultural teaching, namely employing foreign agricultural teachers, sendingstudents overseas to get educated in agricultural science and making them come back toChina working in agricultural education, and establishing special institutes to educateagricultural teachers. Unfortunately, all these measures did not turned out as expected.The funds supporting agricultural academies came from sources like government finance,donations from government officers and bureaucrats, as well as charges from the students,among which, the most common resource was government officers and bureaucrats’contribution. Consequently, there were rapid growth in the numbers of both primary andsecondary agricultural academies and the number population of students. As a part ofprofessional education, though, they only accounted for a small proportion of the wholeeducational system.Chapter Ⅱ features the switch of terms from “academy” to “school”, which wasnothing but an empty gesture to give extra emphasis on the clear distinction between thenewly-established government with and the old empire. On the other hand, the preferenceof A&B over primary and secondary agricultural education manifested the determinationto disconnect the different levels of the system, a real breakthrough of the traditionaleducation, which turned out to be too large a challenge in practice. Since the beginning of“Renzi-Guichou Educational System”, the higher education for agriculture was separatedfrom vocational education system, limiting agricultural education to nothing higher thanmiddle-level. Another problem during this period was the lack of really practicaltextbooks that could satisfy the need of Chinese agricultural development. The teacherswere fostered in the same way that started in the late Qing Dynasty, and the teaching staffmainly came from the special institutes for agricultural teachers. Agricultural schools gotfunded from the government, agricultural units, private donation and tuition. Despite thefact that it received less finance in the secondary education, vocational education wasamong those best-financed in term of its student population, a great advantage overtechnological schools and business schools.Chapter Ⅲ focuses on the extent of freedom agricultural education enjoyed in thisstage. The author maintains that the reasons for the freedom lie in two things, one is therevision of the former teaching system, and the other is the embodiment of “GoldenMean”. During this period, the first agricultural educational curriculum standard was set,which also manifested the feature of freedom. There also appeared some textbooks foragricultural education, but this did not change the situation that textbooks were scarce for agricultural education in general. The freedom could also be located in the cultivation ofteaching staff. However, the seeming freedom, in fact, was based on theacknowledgement of the former pattern of agricultural school teaching staff training. Thefunding of vocational education during this period was lessening in the whole secondaryeducation expenditure. The author holds that the reason for this is that thevocationalization of common education rendered by the adoption of new teaching systemsince1922made it possible for the common education to share the funding originallydesigned for vocational education.Chapter Ⅳ compares the teaching system of this period with “Renzi-GuichouEducational System”, finding there is little difference between them due to the fact thatsome problems were unsolvable against the historical condition. For the first time, thesetting of agricultural school was specified in the form of law, but this should not beoveremphasized, because it was just a part of legal construction during the Republicperiod. For the first time, there appeared the teaching schedules for the courses ofagricultural education sanctioned by the Ministry of Education, which helped in theimprovement of agricultural education, but there were still no curriculum standards, andthe major reason for this was the subjective omission. There finally emerged theagricultural education textbooks sanctioned by the Ministry, but other sections ofvocational education still did not have textbooks approved by the Ministry. The issue ofteaching staff in agricultural education was not as serious as before due to thedevelopment of vocational education on the whole, but the outbreak of the Anti-JapaneseWar did not give the chance for this to function obviously. To rescue the imbalance ofsecondary education brought about by “Guichou Educational System”, the governmentput forward a series of measures to promote vocational education, but this did not changethe dominant position of middle school education.Chapter Ⅴ centers on the changes in agricultural education caused by the Civil War.The agricultural schools still adopted the curriculum standard set up in1933. To compiletextbooks for agricultural education,“Textbooks Compiling Committee for AgriculturalVocational Education” was founded, and a rewarding system was also created, which didfunction in the compilation of textbooks for agricultural education. The teaching staffissue of agricultural education aroused more attention, and improvement was achieved,but far lagging behind the expectation. The funding for agricultural education was still aproblem. State-sponsored policy during the war spurred the progress of vocationaleducation, but this did not alter the imbalance between vocational education and middleschool education. The author claims that the causes for this are, one the one hand, the promised vocational education funding by the government could not be allocated asscheduled, on the other hand, there was also a corresponding rewarding system forcommon education.Chapter VI is a discussion on the common problems in the first five chapters. Theauthor starts with the issue of the “possibility” and the “necessity” of agriculturaleducation in the period of the Republic of China from the aspect of the rural economy.The discussion is carried out mainly from three dimensions：farmers, agriculture and thecountryside. The author believes that the needs of agriculture and the farmers madeagricultural education necessary, rendering it possible for its development. However, theanalysis should be established on the basis of the demystification of the “false trail”(atheory named “agriculture bankruptcy”). Besides,“agriculture first” or “industry first”was another “false trail” in agricultural education during the period of the NationalRepublic of China. The author gives a systemic presentation of the discussion, hoping toprovoke more considerations on this topic.Chapter VII elaborates on the meaning of this empirical study. In this part, theauthor tries to analyze the characteristics of the rural vocational education during theperiod of the National Republic of China in metric level, based on data statistics of thewhole208issues3139theses in the journal Education and Vocation (1917-1949). Twodimensions,“agricultural education” and “rural education”, are mainly focused, whichare statistically analyzed from four aspects: quantity of articles, ages of their distribution,presentation of nations, and provinces introduced in China. The results show that the ruralvocational education of the National Republic of China was well-provided in both aspectsof “the quality” and “the quantity”: the rural vocational education of the NationalRepublic of China was “keeping pace with the times”; the rural vocational education ofthe National Republic of China was “well concerned from both inside and outside”. Theresearches only on the development of agricultural education during the period of theNational Republic of China can’t get these conclusions, which prove the significance ofthis empirical study from another side.