(2) In the "School Diary" (1911) by the Poet Hsü Chih-mo : Evaluation of the materials for Chinese educational history in a changing period

Abstract

China entered into its Modern era, when it encountered Western Europe, beginning with the Opium War in 1839. The first step of the modernization of the Chinese school system was taken in the proclamation and the enforcement of "Ch'in-ting Hsueh-t'ang Chang-Ch'eng" by the Ch'ing government in 1903. Conventional studies of modern Chinese educational history have done research in both the institutional history and the history of thought for the time of the abolition of the old system for securing government officers and the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1912, or the 5・4 movement in 1919. The abolition of the old system of "K'o-chu" (1905) was a consequence of the school system of 1903. Most of the conventional studies have appeared to be large-scale surveys. Studies on the history of political thought at the end of Ch'ing period are fairly advanced. However studies of educational history have not yet fully adopted the fruits of the studies on the history of political thought, so that they have tended to be mere descriptions or lists of governmental documents. Above all, it was a serious defect that the studies failed to discover and make use of the original materials which disclose the contents and practice of the "New Education" after its introduction in 1903. The autobiographic "School Diary" (1911) by Hsu Chih-mo (1895〜1931), who "was the Chinese bourgeois and first, as well as the last, poet" was written when he was sixteen years old at Che-Chiang-hsing Hang-fu Chung-hsueh-t'ang, at the time of the collapse of Ch'ing government. The diary tells us about the curriculum of the first grade at a secondary school under the system of 1903, the daily contacts between students, teachers and proctors, and especially, the reflection of the great excitement about the advance of the revolutionary movement on school-life. This diary by an intellectnal student gives a clear picture of a facet of the changing period on the eve of the establishment of the Chinese Republic. In this sense, this book is an important source material for intensive studies of the modern history of Chinese education.