Transforming China through education: Yan Xiu, Zhang Boling, and the effort to build a new school system, 1901-1927

In 1901 Chinese schooling was centered on the Confucian classics and trained men for the empire's civil service examinations. By 1927 a full-fledged system of Western-style education for both men and women had taken root in China. This dissertation examines the generation of educational reformers who brought about this remarkable change. By examining the work of two prominent educators--Yan Xiu and Zhang Boling--and relating their initiatives to thought and practice among their colleagues nationwide, the dissertation reveals how educational reformers shaped the formation of the new school system.; In 1898 Yan Xiu and Zhang Boling both committed themselves to strengthening China by reforming its educational system. For the next three decades, they worked together as partners in promoting Western-style education and building up a private school system known as Nankai. Yan Xiu was the more active of the two reformers in the late Qing period, setting up a variety of new-style primary schools and influencing national policy through his post at the imperial Board of Education. Zhang Boling gained greater prominence in the Republican period by building up Nankai Middle School into a nationally-known institution and adding a university division and a women's branch. Because of his successes, Zhang Boling's name became synonymous with high-quality private education.; Throughout the years between 1901 and 1927, a time when educational reformers were largely free from central government control, the efforts of Yan Xiu and Zhang Boling to reform the school system provide insight into the shifting views and changing strategies of educational reformers throughout China. Over this period educators wrestled with such critical issues as universal education, co-education, and mass literacy. Before 1911 they succeeded in spreading new-style primary education and in creating tbe first women's schools; during the Republic they expanded social and vocational schooling, introduced mass literacy campaigns, and improved secondary and higher education for both men and women. An analysis of these efforts shows that, though failing to accomplish their goal of modernizing China, educators of the early twentieth century transformed the world view of the Chinese elite, helped to improve the position of women in Chinese society, and set in place an educational structure that persists to the present day.