Study On Liang Shu-ming’s Rural Education Thought

Liang Shuming(1893~1988), the patriotic personage of modern China, is a renowned thinker and educator both at home and abroad, who advocated for rural education movement and was one representative of Modern New Confucianism. He achieved fame owing to the works “Eastern culture and philosophy”, and the book which makes greatest impact on the social construction of China is “The Theory of Rural Construction”. Because of his independent thinking and be the same as outside and inside, he is regarded as the “last of the Confucian” by Ai Kai, the Harvard University Professor. The interesting thing is that Liang Shuming is called the Confucian scholar by the posterity, but actually, he had never to read Confucianist’s four books and five classics earnestly in childhood, nor accept the traditional Chinese private school education. In fact, he studied English in the new style school under his father’s arrangement. For this reason, he was extremely repugnant this kind of high Suspension Theory of the Confucian classics, and he had strong sense of utilitarianism and pragmatism before his youth time. Different from many representatives of Neo-Confucian, Liang Shu-ming has no intention to be a knowledgeable master from beginning to end. He stated repeatedly that he was not in the knowledge but in the problem. Therefore, his understanding of Confucianism is derived from his own life experiences and the life of enlightened sense. In particular, he scorned the etymology knowledge but focus on the elucidation of the spirit of Confucianism. Especially the Confucian philosophy of life, he had a deep taste of martial arts training and the life-style of Confucianism and had a deep practice. Liang Shumin’s idea is mainly embodied in the aspects of life and society. Liang Shuming’s thoughts of life issues are mainly under the influence of Buddhism and Confucianism, he had deep observations of the difference and similarities between this two spirits. On thinking of social issues, he was under the influence of Socialist thought. At the same time, he used the Confucian way of life and ethical spirit to judge capitalist society and socialist society in west. In a multi-year rural education practice, he attempted to take Confucianist’s ethics spirit as the guidance, simultaneously to absorb the western politics and society’s positive factor(for example, association organizes spirit), and hoped to find an ideal road for the human society.This paper takes the Liang Shuming’s rural education as object, through detailed reading of his major works, collation and analysis of the results in the study of his thought of rural education, systematically presents a series of issues related to his thought of rural education. This paper mainly divided into the introduction, the main body of the thesis and the conclusion.The first part of this paper is the introduction. As the first chapter of the full text, it is mainly based on the existing work to induce and summarize his rural education, then to pointing out its deficiencies, and explains the causes of this question, the theoretical and practical meaning, also points out the innovation point and shortcomings.The second part of this paper is the main body of this thesis, which is divided into four chapters: from the second chapter to the fifth chapter. The second chapter is starting from the theoretical source of his rural educational theory, his theory of rural education is not only to their unique understanding of the West and deep conception of rationality, also absorbed the Denmark thought of public education and rural educator of the same period academic results. The third chapter discusses the practice of Liang Shuming rural education in different periods, and notes Liang Shuming is both a theorist and a practitioner. In his lifetime, the problems of life and all of his Chinese question have always been the direction of thinking, and he continued to put his thoughts into practice with two major problems. Itt can be said that the rural education thought was forming during his constant thinking and practicing. The fourth chapter, through the analysis of the specific content of the Rural Education thought, points out that Liang Shuming is the only one rural educator with a set of theoretical system comparing with the rural educator during the same periods. The fifth chapter is to detail the implications of the Rural Education, on the basis of Rural Education Thought understanding, it summarized the four main features of its rural education. First, it focuses on life affective education. Second, it is to emphasize equal opportunities in education.Third, it advocates community-oriented education view. Fourth, it encourages the intellectual to go to the country and be integrated with the farmers. By deeply analysis on the four characteristics of Liang Shuming’s rural education ideas, it points out the advantages and disadvantages of rural education, and provides the historical experience for the modernization of rural education in china.The third part is the conclusion of this paper, which is mainly a summary of comments.