The Study On The Popular Lecture Agency Of Jilin (1915～1931)

Popular lecture agency was an important social education institution in the northern warlords period, aiming at enlightening the people and making general people acquire citizen qualification. The construction of Popular lecture agency in Jilin Province began in 1916, and when comes to 1922 it has started to take shape. Besides, the public education museum started to be promoted in the whole nation in 1928. Thus, the establishment of lecture institution in each county has gradually be replaced by this more comprehensive social education institutions. After the Mukden Incident in 1931, the whole area of Jilin Province has been occupied by enemies. Although a part of the popular lecture institution got retained, there have been formed some fundamental changes in that they have become a tool of slavery education.Even though in the wave of the Enlightenment Movement in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republican Period, spontaneous power from civil society was most valuable, the government still was the main leader of the popular lecture. And the central government was responsible for taking initiative and planning blueprint, while local government was responsible for day-to-day management lecture and providing operating expenses. Those managers and employees of larger lecture institutions were almost academics to absorb a batch of petty intellectuals who have enthusiasm and experience towards the Enlightenment Movement. The organizational structure of grassroots popular lecture agency was usually quite simple, and operating cost was extremely low. Consequently, there did not appear the ills of bureaucratic expansion.The materials of popular lecture were mainly provided by the authority, and then the speakers would reprocess the content according to actual condition, or increase the case with which the audience familiar, even may further popularize the diction. The government’s positioning of popular lecture was through popularizing the universal nature and the social common sense to make people have common knowledge. In addition, the government intended to inspire people by patriotic zeal and strengthened their identity of nationalism. In one word, the government aimed at make the general public people become citizens who meet the requirements of the modern state. When comes to the problems that speakers care about, it becomes more emotional in that if their concerned topics have achieved governmental support and acceptance, the related contents will become one of the major topics of the public lecture in a short time. However, there are many factors that influence speaker’s interest, such as educational background, the shift of hot current affairs even one’s personal experience during some period. During the spreading process of national ideology, speaker actually plays a role of gatekeeper in that they filtrate and restructure the official material through their understanding of information, comprehensive consideration of listeners’ acceptance abilities and current affairs, and then integrate the actor’s values and preferences, ways of thinking into the speech materials. As a result, it will have a profound impact on governmental attempt of establishing the modern national consciousness.The speaker group which was comprised of the bottom intellectuals was not only different from elite intellectuals, but also different from ordinary people in that they mostly have accepted traditional Chinese learning education and shallow western learning training. Thus, they were at the initial level of reading and writing. Although they were concerned about current affairs, they were unable to move into the high rank. For many people, engaging in jobs with low-income and harsh conditions becomes their helpless option. Therefore, once there appears a better job, they will dismiss his job for working on it, which leads to the lack of stability of staff in lecture institution. And there existed a strong separating sense with ordinary people because that the cultural position of speakers tended to become conservative, speakers lacked of enough scientific literacy and were strongly influenced by nationalism. As a result, although they had faithfully conveyed the authority ideology, their abilities not equal to their ambitions when in face of reconciling the contradictions between Chinese and western culture.Although authority attempted to regard popular lecture agency as the representative of state ideology in grass-roots society, the public Enlightenment Movement which led by the government has been in trouble due to the following reasons: the uneven quality of the speakers; the obsolete lecture content, lack of infrastructure, shortage of operating funds; unable to cope with the complex social education function; the contradiction between national ideology itself and many other problems. Leaders of the public education movement lacked enough patience and confidence to ordinary people’s abilities, and they tended to require ordinary people abide by strict norms of behavior, rather than waiting for the basic elements of modern civilization gradually mature in the grass-roots society. In effect, the cognition of public enlightenment movement from official and speaker group have not broken through the scope of the traditional masses education activities,the Enlightenment Movement was guided by pre-modern public educational thoughts, and it input the so-called national ideology to the lower classes accompanying with a large amount of the conservative cultural factors, which efforts that are not easy to accomplish the modernization of grass-roots society by itself.