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In Fusion of East and West, Limin Bai presents a major work in the English language that focuses on Chinese textbooks and the education of children for a new China in a critical transitional period, 1902-1915. This study examines the life and work of Wang Hengtong (1868-1928), a Chinese Christian educator, and other Christian and secular writings through a historical and comparative lens and against the backdrop of the socio-political, ideological, and intellectual frameworks of the time. By doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on the significant connection between Christian education, Chinese Christian educators and the birth of a modern educational system. It unravels a cross-cultural process whereby missionary education and the Chinese education system were mutually re-shaped.
In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the German kindergarten - banned by the Prussian government as revolutionary - spread rapidly to nations around the globe, becoming at once a local and modernising institution. This book is a collection of case studies that describe the remarkable diffusion, adoption, and transformation of the kindergarten in eleven modern and developing nations. The contributors to the volume examine the process by which the idea of the kindergarten arrived and was adopted in these countries - a process that invariably demonstrated the immense power of local cultures, whether Christian, Buddhist, or Islamic, to respond to and reformulate borrowed ideas. Borrowing cultures do not engage in passive mimicry, the studies show, but recast ideas for their own purposes. Beginning with Germany, the chapters of this book follow the kindergarten idea as it passed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the United States, then England, Australia, Japan, China, Poland, Russia, Vietnam, Turkey, and Israel. The contributors examine such complex political, social, and cultural issues as the relationship of gender to national educational policies, the impact of mi
This is the first study to take a comprehensive look at transnational children’s literature in the period before 1900. The chapters examine what we mean by ‘children’s literature’ in this period, as well as what we mean by ‘transnational’ in the context of children’s culture. They investigate who transmitted children’s books across borders (authors, illustrators, translators, publishers, teachers, relatives, readers), through what networks the books were spread (commercial, religious, colonial, public, familial), and how the new local identities of imported texts were negotiated. They ask which kinds of books were the most mobile, and they consider what happens to texts when ...
"Sibao today is a cluster of impoverished villages in the mountains of western Fujian. Yet from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth century, it was home to a flourishing publishing industry. Through itinerant booksellers and branch bookshops managed by Sibao natives, this industry supplied much of south China with cheap educational texts, household guides, medical handbooks, and fortune-telling manuals. It is precisely the ordinariness of Sibao imprints that make them valuable for the study of commercial publishing, the text-production process, and the geographical and social expansion of book culture in Chinese society. In a study with important implications for cultural and ec...
This book, inspired by the sociologist Günter Dux, co-edited by the historian Hans Ulrich Vogel, and introduced by Mark Elvin, is a collective intellectual masterpiece written by some of the world’s leading scholars. Its purpose is to illuminate premodern Chinese ways of thinking about Nature by comparing them with their counterpart traditions in Europe. In so doing it also subtly reshapes our understanding of premodern European concepts of the natural world. The domains covered principally include philosophy, language, poetry, science, and mathematics, and their relations with society, technology, and politics. By analyzing the frequent partial similarities between these great two cultural areas in the context of their overall contrasts, it points the way for the first time to defining accurately the differences that have been critical for world history.
This volume offers a comprehensive overview of Chinese language teaching in New Zealand, in light of the declining interest in foreign language learning in Anglophone countries. While existing scholarly works have discussed Chinese language education in other Anglophone countries, this book is the first to provide an in-depth examination of the landscape of Chinese language teaching in contemporary, multicultural New Zealand, featuring insights from leading experts. The book consists of 21 chapters written by 29 contributors, including research students, experienced teachers, and leading scholars in every educational sector, from preschool to university and from mainstream education to commu...
The chapters in this book provide a diverse set of topics, perspectives and formulations about educational issues in a group of important Pacific Rim countries. Each contributor explores an area of national educational importance for their particular country, taking care to locate themselves within their own national context and then to look outwards to consider the educational relevance of the Pacific Rim and, more generally, globalisation.
Based on recent research and insights from political activism, the volume explores changing manifestations and articulations of gender in China.
Maintaining education as a pedagogical space for human formation, this book is distinctive in looking at the crisis rather than the success of Chinese education. The editors and contributors, mostly overseas and mainland Chinese scholars, argue that modern Chinese education has been built upon a superficial and instrumental embrace of Western modernity and a fragmented appropriation of Chinese cultural heritage. They call for a rethinking and re-envisioning of Chinese education, grounded in and enriched by various cultural traditions and cross-cultural dialogues. Drawing on Chinese history and culture, Western and Chinese philosophies, curriculum and pedagogical theories, the collected volum...