Discussion On The Gender Education Thought In Family Rules And Regulations Of The Song Dynasty

The family preeepts in the Song dynasty make a huge differenee from its former generation in content and form.During this period,the family precepts are rich in content,multifarious and cover a wide range.Accordingly,taking the Song dynasty family precepts work as the main historical data,combined with the Song anthology,the official history biographies and other historical materials,shows the specific contents about the people admonish their children in Song dynasty,and analyzes the essence and impact of the extremely different educational contents for men and women.The male education in the family precepts in Song dynasty mainly involves four aspects:self-cultivation and encourageruent,how to be an official,maintaining families and making friends.Scholars in the Song dynasty aimed to educate their male offspring to be determined to study,cultivating feudal ethics that taking loyalty,filial piety,benevolence and righteousness as the core and asking them to put the ethics into practice in the daily codes of conduct.When guiding children to study,some use strict methods,some use gentle ones,and others give their children advices on learning methods and strategies based on their own experience.In addition,they give specific advices to those who are or are going to be officers.Finally,maintaining the family ethical order and material conditions are the important components in family rules and regulations of the Song dynasty.Different from the task of men:cultivating their morality,regulating their family,governing a country,and leveling the world,the educational system for women includes morality,words,deeds,duties and responsibilities they should undertake.They are taught to be docile and lowliness,obey the arrangements made by the male patriarchs,and be loyal to their husbands.In the process of dealing with housework,they should be diligent,thrifty and tolerant.In terms of words and deeds,they should keep good manners,speak and act cautiously and be educated and reasonable women.It is worth mentioning that,the norms of female responsibility in the content of family precepts are not inferior to males.On the contrary,they are expected to take on lots of responsibilities,including looking after parents,breeding offspring,doing housework and assisting husband.The authors of the family precepts in the Song Dynasty seek to shape the ideal female image in traditional society as a male accessory.The scholars in the Song dynasty try to standardize the words and deeds of men and women through the different educational contents in the works of the family precepts,and expressed the expectations of the Song dynasty society for the ideal relationship between the sexes and the role,making individuals of different genders within the family and even the whole society defend their position and perform their duties to build an ideal gender order.In fact,it is essentially the maintenance of the Confucian traditional role and gender culture by the scholars in the Song dynasty.It is also an effective way for the ruling class to educate and promote mainstream values.It has become one of the effective ways to spread national rituals to the civil society.This gender culture of male superiority has a profound influence at that time and in later generations.