A Study On The Development Of Individuality Education Thought In China In The First Half Of The 20th Century

The individualized education has experienced a tortuous and rough development process in the first half of the 20th century. In the development process, educators began to pay attention to children’s personality differences and promote their healthy growth through changing many factors in teaching.In late Qing Dynasty, educators began to introduce the idea of individualized education, to find a recipe for improving Chinese education and the depressed society. And it opened up the development process of individualized education in China. With some significant changes happening to the country’s social environment around 1912, the individualized education got a favorable development opportunity. And since 1915, China has promulgated a number of educational policies, making a new situation for its growth. The outbreak of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 has pushed this campaign of emancipation of the mind to a climax. And the campaign advocated science, democracy and individual freedom, strengthening the concept of people’s personality as well as the sense of liberating individuality. Besides, the promulgation and implementation of the New Education System in 1922 and many lectures of Western educators in China, has become important driving forces behind the development flourishing of individualized education. During more than ten years of rapid spreading in the country, on the one hand, the individualized education has been gradually improved at the theoretical level, and guiding the teaching and learning activities with some success at the practical level. However on the other hand, there have been some mistakes in the teaching practice, which hindered seriously the development of the individualized education. But the publicity of education purposes and other documents about Three Principles of the People, has revived the individualized education, and brought another hot development climax in the subsequent years. On the basis of reflect on the individualized education practice in the previous period, the educators focused on advocating and researching the individualized education with a sensible attitude and the consideration of Chinese actual situation.At present, the researches on the individualized education mostly focused on the static studies, such as research on individualized education of a certain stage or some educators. But the dynamic study of individualized education development process is rarely involved. From the historical perspective, the paper adopts methods including literature analysis, historical analysis and comparative to study the development process of individualized education. Based on studying the individualized education development process from beginning to the first boom to revival, it summarizes the development characteristics in each stage to show changes of the individualized education content that occurred in different stages. The content of individualized education changed from nationality education to the individualism freedom development, and to achieving personality education in groups.The rise and development of Individualized Education pushed the school education powerfully at that time. And it had a profound impact on the development of Chinese school education. In fact, it provided a pretty valuable experience for the current education reform.