Research On The Three-character-primer

The’Three Character Primer" is one of the representative works of Chinese traditional enlighten education, but its author is still an unknown academic myth. This article is aimed to propose a new conjecture for this concern with the method of documents research. At the same time, by collecting the documents, the version system of ’Three Character Primer" would be sorted out, and the value of the propagation of "Three Character Primer" would be re-explained. The research contents are as following:The article is divided into three chapters:The first chapter researches the author and formation of "Three Character Primer". On the basis of the previous researches, this article steps further with the collection and analysis of the historical documents of Wang Yinglin and Ou Shizi and then works out that the author of the"Three Character Primer" is named in Wang Yinglin but actually drafted by Ou Shizi at the end of Song dynasty, and finally formed at late middle of Yuan dynasty with additional supplement by other people.The second chapter sorts out different versions of the "Three Character Primer" The original version of the "Three Character Primer" was lost long time ago, the various current versions of the "Three Character Primer" are the versions that are remarked, revised and reproduced by later generations, but the early remarked version is considered the most similar version to the original one by the academic society. This article classifies the versions of the "Three Character Primer" into three categories, remarked version, revised version and reproduced version, and analyses and introduces each representative versions.The third chapter discusses the situation and reasons of the propagation of the"Three Character Primer". This article starts from the propagation situation of the "Three Character Primer", introduces the propagation of the"Three Character Primer" in China. It is considered, in this article, that the "Three Character Primer" is widely spread in China is because of its own value. The value lays in two aspects:one is the unity of the usage and culture in the content; the other is the uniqueness of the format, which is suitable for the enlighten education.