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.
Peter Zarrow is a professor in the Department of History, University of Connecticut, where he focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of modern China, and an adjunct research fellow at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica. His 2012 work, After Empire: The Conceptual Transformation of the Chinese State, 1885-1924, won the First Scholarly Monograph Award in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica. He has been a visiting scholar at the British Academy, L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, and served as Hu Shi Memorial Chair Professor, Academia Sinica in 2013.
Title: Educating China: Knowledge, Society and Textbooks in a Modernizing World, 1902–1937
Author: Zarrow, Peter
ISBN: 9781107535756
Binding:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Publication Date: 2018-02-08
Number of Pages: 294
Weight: 0.5127 kg
'What textbooks say today generates heated debate from Tokyo to Texas. Zarrow's landmark study of textbooks in late imperial and early Republican China shows how and why they mattered a century ago for reimagining the people, the culture, the past and the future of China - an indispensable book for educators and historians of modern China.' John Fitzgerald, Swinburne University of Technology
'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