Research On Ma Yifu’s Confucian Educational Thought

Since modern times,in both form and content,Western school education has gradually replaced China’s inherent traditional education,which led to Confucian education falling into a modern predicament as well as traditional Confucianism.Facing these circumstances,as a Confucian scholar with the most traditional characteristics in Modern Neo-Confucianism,to continue the line of sages and rebuild the traditional Confucian values to alleviate Chinese people’s sense of danger,Ma Yifu vigorously advocated promoting the revival of Confucianism through Confucian education.Ma Yifu did not write a monograph on Confucian education to show his systematic theory of Confucian education,but his main ideas and the basic structure of Confucian education are reflected in the lecture notes such as Taihe Yishan Lectures and Fuxing Academy Lectures.He put forward his Confucian views and Confucian education propositions based on Confucianism of the past.When Ma Yifu built his Confucian education doctrine,he directly inherited the doctrine of Confucius and Mencius,took Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism as the doctrinal origin,took the Six Arts of Confucianism as the root,took self-reflection as the path of self-cultivation and doing scholarly research,and took cultivating people who truly love the knowledge as his ideal.This is embodied: awakening the inherent principles of human nature,changing the temperament,removing covers and reverting to the original state with the Six Arts;understanding the principles of the mind and nature,digging the principles,and cultivating morality with the Six Arts;returning to the original nature of oneself,making the heart accord with the human nature while cultivating the human nature and establishing ways of conducting oneself in a society dominated by the morality with self-reflection.Ultimately,its purposes were to achieve Fu-xing(which means restoring the human nature given by the Heaven and showing the morality of human nature)through the Six Arts to establish the foundation of China’s national spirit and realize the ideal of saving China.At the same time,it aimed to inspire all human beings to think about human nature and morality.Ma Yifu realized that traditional Confucianism could no longer be inherited and carried forward through modern school education.For this reason,he inherited the independent spirit of the Song Dynasty Academy and founded the Fuxing Academy,intending to find a foothold for Confucianism outside the school system at that time and to carry out the practice of running schools that specialized in the academic origins of China.Ma Yifu was a pure Confucian scholar who is remarkable and understood the ancient and the present knowledge.His Confucian doctrine,Confucian education doctrine,and his spiritual pursuit and practice of running the school have important inspiration and reference significance for the revival and education of Chinese traditional culture today.