Cai Yuanpei Moral Education Thought And Reality

Cai Yuanpei, the famous educator, thinker, scholar and revolutionist, is very famous inmodern history of China. At the turn of the late19thand early20thcentury, China was on theedge of subjugation due to the failure both in the war of anti-aggression and the attempt ofrevolution. In the meantime, there was a severe argumentation among the Chinese thinkersover such issues as how to regard western culture, how to learn from western culture, moralculture in particular, how to deal with Chinese traditional culture and how to look at therelationship between traditional Chinese culture and its western counterpart. In response, Mr.Cai advocated Five-Aspect Education concept, namely: Education of Military Citizenship,Education of Utilitarianism, Education of Civic Virtues, Education of World Outlook andEducation of Aesthetics. He claimed that the Five-Aspects of the education system should beadopted in accordance with the situation and Education of Civic Virtues should be the core ofthe whole system. When it comes to culture, he favored the rational thinking, in other words,he advised that we should develop our traditional culture on the base of critical inheritanceand on the freedom of thoughts. As to western culture, he thought that the essence of it oughtto be learnt and made use of. He clearly stated that the freedom, equality and brotherhoodneed to be adopted from western culture and be the doctrine of Education of Civic Virtues.Mr. Cai elucidated in details the ultimate purpose, the base and the hopeful function ofmoral education. This leads to the clarification of the interrelated relationship amongindividual, family, society and nation. In addition to these, he also focused heavily on theimportance of social morality education to amend the traditional educational value whichcaused the preponderance of individual virtue over social morality. The things mentionedabove lead to a safe conclusion: there is a lot of inadequacy in the Education of MilitaryCitizenship and the Education of Utilitarianism and there is an absolute correctness in theEducation of Civic Virtues. On the other hand, according to what he said, the doctrine of theEducation of Civic Virtues should be the concept of freedom, equality and brotherhood, which is not only the firm support of the idea of “righteousness, forgiveness and humaneness”included in Confucianism, but also a strong opposition to the inhumane feudal convention.Therefore, his thoughts not only enlightened development of Chinese education back then butalso created an objective answer to the conflicts between Chinese and western cultures.Comparing with Cai’s period, there is a boom in economic, political and culturaldevelopment, but there is also an endless emerge of fake commodities, frauds, corruption andproperty infringement. Amidst the moral deterioration, a restudy of Mr.Cai’s educationalthoughts is of great significance to our economic, political and cultural construction in thelong run.