The Study On Zheng Hesheng’s History Education Theory Of Secondary School

Zheng Hesheng was a prestigious contemporary historian, who possessed encyclopedic knowledge with pursuing history study for decades, and he released many works which covered many important files, such as historiography history, philology, the history of sino-foreign communication and national history. He also had a keen interest in history education, and he had expressed sobering different thoughts in that respect.History education was given rise to an important position in advancing nationalism by the special political environment of establishing the modern national country in 1930s-1940s. And at the same time a tremendous impact on the history education view was caused by the introduction and propagation of history theory of Robinson’s New History in the crash and confluence of Chinese and Western culture. Then a group of scholars as Zheng Hesheng the representative, conducted widespread propaganda of the educational sense of the history to current affairs and was devoted to the primary and secondary education, they built the unique academic environment that saving the country by history education.In such a political environment, Zheng Hesheng built the national-central ideological system of middle school history education on base of the new historiography, the history education requests and his various research on secondary history education. In his theory, he put forward many classical views as following:1.Any personal thoughts on society, nationals and the whole world must target the advancing of the nationalism and the establishment of the national country;2.After defining self-position, the history teachers should cultivate personal qualities, such as, moral character, history accomplishment and teaching skill.3.The history teachers should keep up with the times and have the ability to use diversified methods to improve the efficiency of the class teaching.4.History teaching requested the optimization of teaching equipment to collect the paper and the concrete material no matter in and out the classroom.5.The selection, governing and compilation must be orientated to the theme of nationalism, for the history textbook was the carrier of teaching target and value.6.The old evaluation system based on examinations must be improved in test questions, test form and evaluation standard to break the old tradition.To sum up, the system was the collection of epochal character, comprehensiveness, scientificalness and openness.Zheng Hesheng made history education a link between the history research and current affairs, to make them interact more. This was not his individual but also the reflection of historians’ bearing of social responsibility and mission in the period of the Republic of China. Although some deficiencies did exist in his perspective in his education theory of secondary history education research, his investigation and thinking was in the lead of the century, for it was in accordance with the requirements of time and education, promoting the process of localization of history teaching method system, and setting an example for the reformation of nowadays middle history education.