With Western Heritage Of Innovation - Thirty Or Forty Years Mei Yiqi Generalist Educational Thought And Practice Of Research

Mei Yiqi was one of the most senior, renowned and enormously productive educational theorists and practicists in Chinese contemporary higher education. Liberal education is the essential part of his educational thought. However, his thought has been neither unearthed nor understood completely and exactly. This essay tries relative objectively to evaluate his thought about liberal education from which we can get some inspirations in the course of transformation in the Chinese liberal higher education by means of inquiring into its formation, its connotation, its characteristics, its practice and its influence;Mei Yiqi's liberal education thought, both ethnic and contemporary, as the representative of the liberal education theory with Chinese characteristics, merged with the western idea which is based on the Confucian college education, is the product of modernizing the Chinese tertiary education by thinking reflectively about its malpractices.The highlight of Mei's liberal education thought is that he carried forward the good Chinese university traditions and integrated with the general education systems and measures in modern universities (esp. in American's). It was endowed with epoch significance by developing the connotation of the word 'liberal', which means seeking for perfect character in the past, limited within the humanities, social sciences and science faculties, into one which synthesized multi-disciplined knowledge, moral education and learner-centered education. It inherited the progressive pedagogics about the intimate relationship between lectures and learners, teaching benefiting teachers and students, giving lectures with freedom, etc. and created a new way to general education in the process of criticizing mechanized tuition organization in modern universities and drawing lessons from the western academic freedom.Mei's liberal education thought, which extracted and distilled from the pedagogic reform and management practice in Tsinghua university,highly combined theory with practice. Tsinghua university has made an outstanding achievement in the training of talents and become a famous university in a short time based on his thought which is the policy of its management.This research mainly uses literature review and tries to draw lessons from Mei's thought in Chinese-based western education theory, modernized traditional education theory and reform in education on the basis of literature review focusing on putting Mei's thought at the epoch juncture of three forces for transforming the traditional higher education, regenerating modern higher education and disseminating western tertiary education.The body of the thesis includes six chapters. Chapter One (Introduction) tries to illustrate its aim and methodology, briefly review the former achievements in scientific research and discriminate some concepts concerned. Chapter Two tries to reveal the three phases about the development of shaping Mei Yiqi's liberal education thought by analyzing its macro background from the culture background, educational situation and Tsinghua traditions etc. Chapter Three tries to analyze the basic connotation about Mei's thought from the origination of his idea, the basis of his theory and his basic proposition. Chapter Four tries to introduce in particular how to put his thought into practice in the engineering education in Tsinghua university on the basis of reviewing its implementation there. Chapter Five tries to generalize the basic characteristics of his thought from three aspects (such as thinking and implementing, etc.). Chapter Six tries to reveal the practical or immediate significance of Mei's thought.