Educating China
Knowledge, Society and Textbooks in a Modernizing World, 1902–1937

A major study of how Chinese school textbooks shaped social, cultural, and political trends in the late imperial and Republican period.

Peter Zarrow (Author)

9781107535756, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 February 2018

294 pages, 38 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.4 kg

'Peter Zarrow's groundbreaking study of Chinese textbooks critically analyzes their presentation of knowledge to students in late Qing and Republican China. Zarrow thoughtfully situates the texts in broad social and cultural currents, demonstrating how they reflected and influenced ongoing political and intellectual dynamics. This book is necessary reading for all students of modern Chinese history.' Robert J. Culp, Bard College

In this major study, Peter Zarrow examines how textbooks published for the Chinese school system played a major role in shaping new social, cultural, and political trends, the ways in which schools conveyed traditional and 'new style' knowledge and how they sought to socialize students in a rapidly changing society in the first decades of the twentieth century. Focusing on language, morality and civics, history, and geography, Zarrow shows that textbooks were quick to reflect the changing views of Chinese elites during this period. Officials and educators wanted children to understand the physical and human worlds, including the evolution of society, the institutions of the economy, and the foundations of the nation-state. Through textbooks, Chinese elites sought ways to link these abstractions to the concrete lives of children, conveying a variety of interpretations of enlightenment, citizenship, and nationalism that would shape a generation as modern citizens of a new China.

Introduction
1. The construction of the state school system
2. Reading modern China
3. Textbook morality, self-cultivation, and civics
4. Good citizens
5. The national subject in time
6. A usable past
7. The importance of space
Conclusion
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Philosophy & theory of education [JNA], History of ideas [JFCX], Asian history [HBJF]