Comparative Study Of Meiyiqi And Hutchins’s Thoughts On Education

Mei yiqi and Hutchins are world-famous great educationists, they lived in thesimilar period. Both of them served as presidents in eminet universities, and theyimplement reform measures in their tenures. Those measures make the universitesdevelop vigorously. In their period, with the huge changes in the fields of politics,economy, culture in China and American, people’s traditional ideas transformedgreatly. The changes influenced higher education deeply, the traditional educationmode was shocked. In the confusion, the new higher education in China made rapidprogress, nevertheless the higher education in American hesitated between old andnew ideas.The two masters’ family background, learning and work experience aresimilar.They were recommended as presidents when their universities were on thehorns of a dilemma. Both of them discussed the thoughts about higher educationsuch as ‘what is university’,‘the function of university’,‘the idea of cultivation inuniversity’,‘the mode of cultivation in university’. In many respects, their viewswere perfectly in harmony without previous consultation. They both thought thatuniversity should be an independent social institution, where people did academicresearch and promoted culture. They praised general education highly, and reckonedthat university should cultivate students in an all-around way.Through the analysis of documents, there is a possibility that MeiYiqi andHuthchins had mutual influences, but those weren’t come from a specific person. Toa great extent, it depends on the ideological trend at the time——people withlong-term perspective in China turned to western to develop our nation. Though Meiwas older than Huthchins, Mei was deeply affected by H in terms of his systematicworks and the educational measures he had taken.According to their own educational thought, Mei and Huthchins effected reformfrom substantial reorganization, curriculum reform, teachers’ management, systemconstruction and other aspects. In the process of implementation, both met resistance,but Huthins met bigger. Despite all sorts of difficulties, however, both of the twopeople overcomed them and made remarkable achievements on their reforms,affecting deeply on the process of national higher education development, andfinally they became famous leaders on each school’s construction history. Nevertheless, their reform remarked unique cultural identities due to theenvironmental differences between those two persons. Mei respected the tranditionalConfucianism, he spared no effort to seek the balance between western culture andchinese tradition. Mei’s reform measures embodied the idea from Confucius andMencius. By contrast, Huthchins’ measures were more radical, he thought thatuniversity should refuse the function of servicing society absolutely. Those measureswere idealizations. It was one of the distinct character on western scholar.MeiYiqi and Huthchins’s higher education idea and reform measures influencedthe development of both countries. All in all, Mei’s idea and mesures more likelyaffected Chinese higher education, however, Huthchins’s had a larger impact inworldwide.