A School in Every Village
Educational Reform in a Northeast China County, 1904-31
A revisionist interpretation of educational reform and rural society in
Qing China.
Description
In the early 1900s, the Qing dynasty implemented a nationwide school
system to buttress its power. Although the Communists, contemporary
observers, and more recent scholarship have all depicted rural society
as feudal and these educational reforms a failure, Elizabeth VanderVen
draws on untapped archival materials to show that villagers and local
officials capably integrated foreign ideas and models into a system
that was at once traditional and modern, Chinese and Western. Her
portrait of education reform both challenges received notions about the
modernity-tradition binary in Chinese history, and addresses topics
central to debates on modern China, including state making and the
impact of global ideas on local society.