A Study Of Hu Shi 's Thought Of Chinese Language Education

Shi Hu, as one of the core figures in Chinese intellectual history of 20th century, he appointed himself with the mission of "making innovations rather than pursuing fame and wealth", he made unprecedented exploration in various fields including literature, philosophy, history, morality, education and culture. Besides, he was the first to import western educational theories into China, which propelled the transformation of Chinese education from traditional one to modern style. His ideas influenced the Chinese educators to dedicatedly explore new knowledge generation by generation.This research aims to explain the complexity of Shi Hu’s cultural characteristics, and tosystematically illustrate the formational background of Shi Hu’s idea about Chinese education philosophy, basic structures, as well as its implications to current teaching through carefully reading "The complete works of Shi Hu" and his other primary educational works. In the aspect of Chinese curriculum objective, Shi Hu proposed to break the bonds by traditional Chinese pedagogy and develop the students’good personality and characters; In the settings of curriculum, Shi Hu removed the courses of penmanship, origins of characters, literature history, added some speaking practice such as speech and debate, which showed the comprehensiveness and practicality of curriculum,; in the content part, Shi Hu emphasized the national Chinese education, meanwhile, he strengthened the relations between the study of national Chinese and traditional Chinese; in the adaptation of textbook, Shi Hu specifically increased the proportion of vernacular novels to improve the aesthetic taste of students, by selecting appropriate articles chronologically; in teaching methods, Shi Hu adopted the pedagogical theory of "at the center of children", stressing the dominate status of students, while replacing the traditional ""lecturing" to "reading books and self-reflection" methods.Although Shi Hu did not directly engage himself into secondary Chinese education, his ideas about Chinese pedagogy together with the broad scope and knowledge he possesses are valued as significant milestone in the area. This paper attempts to comprehensively analyze the idea of Shi Hu about Chinese education, at the same time, it critically reflects on its positive and negative influence combing with current problems faced in reality, with the purpose of proposing corresponding advice.