A Study Of Y. C. James Yan's Citizen Education Thought

Since the New Culture Movement,traditional Chinese Culture has suffered from unprecedented impact, and gradually shifted from the old civilization system to the new civilization system. In the conflicting and converging tide of western and Chinese cultural in Modern China,varied trends of educational thoughts such as mass education,rural educational,life education emerged successively.As one of these important trends,Y. C. James Yan's educational thought,especially his citizen education which is a part of his mass education thought,not only achieved successful verification in China in the 1920s and 1930s,but also guided the social reform in many Asian,African and Latin American countries.It has profound influence on improving citizens' qualities and hastening the birth of modem democracy in these countries. In this new era in China,the report of CPC's 17th Congress emphasizes the need to step up education about citizenship and the establishment of socialist concepts of democracy,the rule of law, freedom,equality and justice.However,citizenship consciousness could not be autonomously self-generated.It relies on systematic citizen education.Therefore,citizen education should be placed in a prominent position because it can help us to achieve the goals set in the CPC's 17th Congress report.Thus,today our studies of Y. C. James Yan's citizen education movement's history,which objectively develops the useful as well as discards the useless parts of his citizen education thoughts and practice,are of profound theoretical and practical significance to strengthen the citizen education and cultivate democratic political concepts.Based on the above-mentioned rational consideration,the framework of this thesis consists the following five parts:The first part analysed the historical conditions of Y. C. James Yan's citizen education. Y. C. James Yan was nurtured by both Confucian culture and Western democratic ideas, which made him the receiver and communicator of two different cultures.This is the key point to understand Y. C. James Yan and the breakthrough point to study his citizen education thoughts and practice.On this basis,the budding, forming and maturing processes of Y. C. James Yan's citizen education thoughts are stressed in this part.The second part discussed the interrelationships between Y. C. James Yan's citizen education and the other three components of his mass education, that is, literary and artistic education, livelihood education and health education in order to show that citizen education is the ultimate aim of his mass education. Broadly, his mass education is citizen education. Literary and artistic education is the base of citizen education whereas livelihood education and health education offer better conditions for citizen education. Therefore, his citizen education runs through his mass education and is the ultimate aim of his mass education.The third part expounded the goals and major contents of Y. C. James Yan's citizen education. By understanding the structure and character of his citizen education's goal, this part nailed down the major content of Y. C. James Yan's citizen education from four aspects: to enhance citizen's national awareness; to cultivate citizen's commonweal consciousness and responsibility concept; to cultivate citizen's civic knowledge and civil morality and to culture citizen's awareness and ability to take part in local and grass-roots political and social life.The fourth part addressed the implementing principles, approaches and methods of Y. C. James Yan's citizen education. Y. C. James Yan explored in practice a set of citizen education principles suitable for China. He created many implementing approaches such as lecture method, advising method, diagram method and practice method. Furthermore, he also created school-pattern, social-pattern and family-pattern teaching forms of citizen education with typical Chinese characteristics.The last part summarized the contemporary value of the thought of Y. C. James Yan's citizen education and revealed its contemporary value by evaluating objectively the effectiveness and limitations of his citizen education thought and practice. To explore the contemporary value of Y. C. James Yan's citizen education thoughts, especially based on relationship between citizen education and ideological and political education, can help us to strengthen today's civic education and enhance the effectiveness of ideological and political education.