The Overall Features Of The Early Chinese Vocational Education And It’s Theoretical Origin

When Opium War broke out in1840, China began to move into a semi-feudalsociety。With the Qing government signing a series of unequal treaties, the nationalconflicts aggravates deeper and deeper. Some Chinese people with advanced ideasvigorously developed the national industry and commerce, this results to create theconditions for the rise of vocational education; But the educational contents studentsreceived was seriously out of real life own to the old idea of" Official Standard", and thestudents’ education could not fit him for a certain job, Graduation means unemployment,this situation became the urgent problem to be solved for educators; With the outbreak ofthe May Fourth cultural movement, many educators introduced many advanced overseasideologies to China, especially Dewey’s pragmatic theory; Coupled with site visits to theUnited States, Philippines, and Japan by Yanpei Huang, who recognized the importance ofthe developing the vocational education; In1921, the new academic structure was underdiscussion and formation, Lu Meng made a lot of valuable advice for the new academicstructure reform, and directed for the development of vocational education.In this study, the evolution of early vocational education is divided into three phases:Initial exploration period (1840-1904); Initial adjustment period (1904-1912); Formalestablishment period (1912-1922). And we provided instructions and explaination to thespecific provisions of the industrial education or vocational education in the academicsystem in every stage. In addition, we summarized the overall features of the earlyvocational education taking the study and understanding of the famous professionaleducator about vocational education by Yanpei Cai, Shusen Gu, Xingzhi Tao, Tao fen Zouand other people as an entry point, namely (a) the socialization of vocational education;(b)the civilian nature of vocational education;(c) the practicality of vocational education;(d)the training ability of vocational education. In the last part of this study we discuss thetheoretical origins of early Chinese vocational education-Dewey pragmatism ideology.And we mainly discuss the reasons for the rise of Dewey pragmatism ideology inChina; The main content of the Vocational Education in Dewey; The main characteristicsof the Dewey vocational education ideology.