Exploration And Analysis Of Lu Shiyi’s Enlightenment Educational Ideas

Lu Shiyi is a Neo-confucianist, educator and scholar in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties. The scholars have conducted research on Lu Shiyi not as adequate as others including Wang Fuzhi, Gu Yanwu and Huang Zongxi and there is more room to develop. And the previous scholars concentrated on his Neo-Confucianism Thought, as a result, both the theory that Neo-Confucianism is the origin and the theory of human nature have already been thoroughly studied and he has always been regarded as a Neo-confucianist. Such research horizon restrains us from studying his other thoughts, which presents an incomplete academic figure of Lu Shiyi to the world. Throughout Lu Shiyi’s life and writings, the author believes that he is an enlightenment educator as well as a Neo-confucianist.This paper aims to highlight the image of Lu Shiyi as an enlightenment educator with the historical background in which Lu Shiyi lived as the logical starting point for the research. He lived in an age when dynasties had been faced with tremendous changes and the whole society was filled with contradictions. The Qing Dynasty had to take a series of measures to consolidate the regime while the social classes summarized the reason why the Ming Dynasty was destroyed, consequently, people attributed it to Wang Yangming’s the learning of the mind in the late Ming Dynasty and all of them up from the emperor down to the student simultaneously pay much attention Zhu Xi’s neo-confucianism. As an adherent, Lu Shiyi felt nostalgic about the Ming Dynasty. He didn’t intend to be an official but wrote lots of books and took active part in the public career closely related to people after the demise of the Ming Dynasty. Because of the frustrated school life in childhood and several setbacks in life experience, Lu Shiyi developed his own unique enlightenment educational ideas.On this basis, Lu Shiyi’s enlightenment thought will be organized and demonstrated from the aspects of the training of children, children’s textbooks, teaching content, teaching principles and methods with the society, the family, the teacher and the school as subjects to stress the importance of abiding by the objective laws for children’s physical and mental development during the implementation of enlightenment education.Finally, through the observation of the current elementary education guided by Lu Shiyi’s enlightenment educational ideas, the author tries to get some inspiration to make a contribution to the current elementary education:in the enlightenment period, the family’s practice should be devoted to two aspects-at first, it should create a comfortable, harmonious and favorable environment for children’s development; secondly, parents should perfect their educational attitudes to safeguard children’s physical and mental health; for teachers, they should form explicit and positive attitude to patiently guide students, and adopt scientific and rational teaching methods to achieve effective teaching results; for the school, it should provide a relaxing and cheerful learning environment for children to care about and guide children in the aspect of spirit, and-establish humanistic systems to train children’s awareness of innovation based on the local actual education situation; for the society, the government should be aware of children’s learning direction in the enlightenment period to expand children’s classic reading, raise the position of Chinese course by improving teacher management and training to achieve the best teaching effect, and inspire children to set up the consciousness of lifelong learning to build a learning society.