The Church’s Experience Of Education In Shimenkan And Its Enlightenment

Shimenkan is a backwoods hamlet at the junction of Guizhou andYunnan provinces. Miao and Yi nationalities live here forgenerations. It is this marginal hamlet that is impoverished andbackward for a long time. In the early20thcentury, the missionariesof the Britain Methodism missionized, ran schools and pushed thedevelopment of educational enterprise in Shimenkan area. Theychanged the poor situation of this area in just a few decades andmade the needy and unknown place to be the “Holy Culture Sites”which is well-known in the world. It is a miracle in the historyof national education. That is the so-called Shimenkan phenomenon.The great contribution for the development especially in educationof Shimenkan area could not be denied which was given by BritainMethodism, although it had the suspicion of religious colonization.We should learn it critically and objectively. The successfulexperience of running schools by Britain Methodism is meaningfulfor the problems of current education development, especially thoserural areas.In this paper, education development situation of Shimenkanarea will be the study object. Striving for the developmentstrategies of our nation’s rural basic education will be thespringboard. The paper will neaten the situation of running schools by Britain Methodism in the first half the20thcentury inmacroscopical way. It has a microscopic research in the fields ofcurriculum, Chinese textbook and teaching methods. Then it canexplore the successes and also summarize the lessons in thedevelopment process. Next, this paper will combine the prevailingproblems of rural basic education in Western China and explore themodern enlightenment given by Britain Methodism. By doing so, itpoints out the proper ways to have a better development ineducation.