Vicational Education Thoughts In Modern China (1840-1927)

Throughout history, the development of the education is not isolated. It is closely linked to the national economy and plays a vital role in a country's development. Nowadays, when our government strongly encourages the development of vocational education, we not only learn from the successful experiences of foreign countries, but also organize and explore our modern concept of vocational education in order to find a way of the modern vocational education with Chinese characteristics. Although the development of vocational education in China is very rapid, there are many problems in vocational education during concrete practice due to the traditional concept that the agricultural vocational education is despised and the universal high school education, for example, imperfect legislation of the vocational education, shortage of fund and teachers, slow development of vocational education in the rural and western areas, a considerable number of people who still do not attach importance to the theoretical study on the vocational education and so on. In addition, some enterprises lack the consciousness of participation in vocational education. To solve today's problems in the development of vocational education, we must make clear the historical sequence of their development and reveal the root causes in the historical development and then finally resolve them. Only learning from history will prevent us from making the same mistakes. From this point of view, it is better to sum up China's vocational education system and the development of the ideas in modern times so that vocational education is better connected with the society than to look for the answers only by practice of vocational education itself, which can avoid fewer detours. And the development of China's vocational education in modern times is a treasure in the theoretical study of contemporary vocational education, it is bound to be a good help for the modernization of China's vocational education. Secondly, we start from the process of the development of the vocational education in our country, combined with the practice, so that we will have a broader scope of the study on vocational education. It may provide a new angle of view, or new thought, for the theoretical research on vocational education. In that case, more people may get enlightenment from it so as to speed up the development of vocational education.This paper, taking the ideological trend of vocational education as a main line, analyzes the historical reasons for its formation as well as the impact on vocational education, thereby it can be seen that the modern ideological trend of vocational education plays important part and takes critical position in the modern Chinese educational history.This paper is divided into five chapters, which respectively presents the rising and development of the ideological trend of vocational education home and abroad with time-varying as the direct clue and the evolution of the ideological trend of vocational education as the indirect clue.The first chapter is the introduction, which describes the main purpose of the study, train of thoughts and research methods.The second chapter presents the infancy of the vocational education from foreign and domestic factors-the emergence of the industrial education in the late Qing Dynasty, which played the role which linked the preceding with the following in describing the emergence and development of the ideological trend of the vocational education.The third chapter shows the brief introduction of the drive which promoted the rising of the vocational education in the early years of the Republic of China. The vigorous development of vocational education in the West promoted the social and economic development of western countries; Western ideas of vocational education found their way to China through various channels, which inspired some educators to have the thoughts of saving the country with industry; and furthermore the development of the domestic economy needed a large number of technical talents which promoted the rising of vocational education.The fourth chapter introduces in detail the several ideas of vocational education that have greater impact during the period of the May Fourth Movement, mainly including "thoughts of pragmatic education", " thoughts of populist education", " Macro-vocational education." The article analyzes the background and characteristics of their own, as well as the educational thoughts and practice by the representative educators of various thoughts, and it also revealed the internal connections between the development of the trend of modern education and the social progress.The fifth chapter introduced the Chinese modern times vocational education ideological thought in the impetus educational reform aspect's historical function, simultaneously also had pointed out the vocational education ideological thought's limitation, expounds it in the Chinese modern times history of education influence.