Women's Vocational Education In The Republic Of China

Chinese women' s vocational education dates back to as early as the Republic of China. During that time both vocational education and women' s education developed to quite an extent. As a combination of the two, women' s vocational education plays a unique role in the development of the vocational education and women' s education.The background of the women' s vocational education lie in four aspects: the development of vocational education and the growth of women' s education at the beginning of the Republic of China; the influence of Dewey' s populism and women' s early industry education. The economic development and the demand for talents further developed vocational education on the basis of the industry education in the late Qing Dynasty. Changes of ideas and the expansion of Women' s Rights Movement stimulated women' s education. The spread of John Dewey' s populism not only made China form a unique and complete educational system of his philosophy, but also enabled the common people to receive our industry education. The establishment of the women' s industry schools in the late Qing Dynasty provided precious experience in principal aims for running a school, courses offered, management for students and the entrance exam regulations for the initiation and the growth of women' s vocational education in the early Republic of China.The ideas of women' s industry education further developed in the early Republic of China and then turned into the thoughts of women' s vocational education. Many people with lofty ideas discussed seriously its importance, how to carry it on, the difficulties it faced and so on. This led to the formation of a complete system of women' s vocational education. Those thoughts were helpful to the emancipation of women and the changes of social perspectivesas well. In addition, they supplied instructions in terms of theory for women' s vocational education career in the Republic of China. Even to the present development of women' s vocational education they still have much importance for reference.This text puts emphasis on the general situation of the growth of women' s vocational education in the Republic of China . From the angle of the general situation in the whole country, it can be divided into three stages: initial development period, swift development period as well as the slowly-developing period. The women' s vocational education system began to take shape in the initial development period from 1912 to 1917. There was an increase in the number of the students and the schools for women' s vocational education. The slowly-developing period occurred from 1927 to 1937. At that time the women' s vocational education was added to the men' s vocational education in the same system because of the enforcement of laws and regulations. Compared with the "early times, both the number of the schools and the proportion of girl students increased a lot. The slowly-developing stage took place during 1937 to 1949, at which time the women' s vocational education developed to a certain extent under special circumstances. After the Anti-Japanese War, action was taken to make the resumption and to popularize its further development. In teaching and administration, its organization was more and more complete and their students had a better future than those in men' s vocational schools. There were three basic types of women' s vocational schools: exclusive women' s vocational schools, subjects on women' s vocation attached to middle schools , continuation schools and institutes attached to universities. The exclusive vocational schools set up fully detailed subjects and they had basic facilities for teaching and training. But the periods of schooling were not enough for vocational courses. Moreover, both teaching materials and the ways of teaching required improving. The courses that the middle schools and continuation schools offered were limited. Students had little chance for practice and thefacilities were fairly poor. On the other hand, the courses in the continuation schools were actually t...