Xu Jiagui
The name of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association (1905-1927) may be unfamiliar to people today. Its former leaders include Zhang Xiao and Huang Yanpei, and the experience of Zhang and Huang in the Suzhou Education Association is also little known today. The author has visited the oldest site of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association (later the seat of the Kuomintang Shanghai Special City Party Department), the building has disappeared, and people nearby have said that they have never heard of this organization. Nominally, the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association was only a provincial-level educational organization; in fact, from the late Qing Dynasty to the Beiyang period, it had nationwide power and influence for many years. And scholars have pointed out that for the May Fourth New Culture Movement, the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association is not an outsider or a passive "response" party, it has played a non-negligible role in the rise of the "New Culture Movement" after the May Fourth Patriotic Movement nationwide. Since the rise of the new cultural movement is not caused by Peking University, then looking back at the "prehistory" of May Fourth, scholars cannot only focus on the intellectual community relying on Peking University. From before and after Xinhai to the eve of May Fourth, it was a critical period in the organizational evolution of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association, and this change was also related to the regional and even national cultural and educational changes in the same period.
On the other hand, the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association belongs to the modern "Education Association" organization. In the study of modern education, there are two common ideas: either to highlight the indicators used to evaluate the level of "education modernization", or to use the classical analytical framework of "official-gentry/people" and "state-local/social". In this way, the problems and conclusions studied by the Education Association are often difficult to distinguish from the research of modern parliaments, chambers of commerce and other organizations. In other words, the "industry" characteristics of the educational association should not be ignored, but we cannot equate it with the more rigorous concept of specialized or professional sectors in later generations. One way to deal with this problem is to fully "historicize" this problem, not to make a static characterization of educational organizations, but to sort out the dynamic process of the occurrence and evolution of the characteristics of the "education" sector itself. Combined with the previous section, the process of changing the characteristics of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association on the eve of May Fourth also affected the history of the "occurrence" of new cultural movements in a broader field of view.
Zhang Jian
One
The study of "organization" cannot be reduced to the study of the "network" of individual leading figures in the organization. This requires sorting out the structure and distribution of powers and responsibilities of the organization since the late Qing Dynasty. In the Qing Dynasty, the position status of the organization can be divided into the categories of president and vice president, officer, commentator, and director. In order to enable jiangsu's provincial-level unofficial education organizations to truly promote the unification of education in a province, the General Education Association was located in Shanghai outside Nanjing and Suzhou, and the president was designated by Ning and Su in turn, and was elected by all members, and the two vice presidents, Dingning and Su, were elected by each of the two vice presidents, Dingning and Su, and the members of Ning and Suzhou were respectively elected. Other staff members have different meeting periods, among which the officers are the most diligent, and the "resident officers" of the officers stationed at the Shanghai headquarters should have the closest relationship with the conference. The names and surnames of the resident officers and vice presidents of the Su Education Association are listed below:
Jiangsu Provincial Education Association has been the president, vice president and resident officer of the association. * At the time, he was called "Prime Minister". ** At the time, it is called "associate".
It can be seen that in the late Qing Dynasty, the president and vice president of the Su Education Association were usually celebrities of prestige in Su Province. However, these celebrities often have multiple titles in the bureaucracy, consultative councils or industrial groups, and it is difficult to say that "education" must be the primary sector label. In light of the usual practice at the time, the main industry labels of the president and vice president were ambiguous, and it was not a problem. It was a common phenomenon in the late Qing Dynasty for gentry and celebrities who lived in politics, commerce, and learning to form or place themselves in a number of industry organizations, and these "industry" organizations were often inextricably linked to other sectoral organizations in terms of personnel and purposes. In September of the year of Yi Wei (1905), when the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association was first established, it was called "Jiangsu Society", and soon changed its name to "Jiangsu Student Affairs Association". The expectations of the initiators of the association were close to the meaning of "scholars" expressed by Liang Qichao during the Penghu Restoration, that is, a kind of assembly of "scholars". Then, what will the "scholars" of a province want to gather into a "group" in the name of "learning"? In this regard, Shen Tongfang (Youqing, 1872-1917, Jiangsu Wujinren, Guangxu Twenty Years Jinshi) understood from the perspective of "local autonomy", saying: "Learners, the prototype of local autonomy, Jiangsu learners, especially the prototype of national society." The "local autonomy" here embodies a certain political ambition based on the locality and relative to the "official rule". In 1906, the first research association attached to the Jiangsu Education Federation was the "Law and Politics Research Society", which was later changed to the "Law and Politics Training Institute", and both promoted Lei Fen (Jixing, 1871-1919, a native of Lou County, Jiangsu Province), a legal and political student at Waseda University, to be in charge, with the purpose of "experimenting with local autonomy as a model for the establishment of a parliament". Combined with the above mentioned "national group and parliament" quoted above by Liang Qichao, the goal of the "group of scholars" here is to establish the "parliament" of the province, which shows the close political connection between "scholars (groups)" and "countries (groups)", or regions and countries.
It can be said that the "society" as a "scholar group" is initially rich in the meaning of "fan group", that is, there is a common political intention as a guarantee for "grouping". However, in 1906, the Qing court ordered the establishment of provincial and county education associations in various localities, and the purpose of this statutory education association was only to "subsidize the education administration and seek the popularization of education", and to "contact with the provincial school offices and the persuasion offices in various parts of the province". The Jiangsu Student Affairs Association was ordered to change its name to "Jiangsu Education Federation", which has since had the dual attributes of "fan group" and "statutory organization". The attribute of "statutory organization" can provide institutional environmental guarantees and facilitate the survival and development of the organization; while the attribute of "fandom" can promote the organization to have goals and act efficiently. However, the situation faced by the Initial Education Federation was that the main goal of the "fandom" was to establish a "parliament" and cultivate "legal and political" talents, which later led to a situation in which the Jiangsu Education Federation, the Preparatory Constitutional Convention and the Jiangsu Provincial Consultative Bureau were almost "trinity" in terms of personnel. However, the requirement of the "statutory organization" is to constrain the actions of the General Education Federation to the field of education, and it is difficult for the Jiangsu Education Federation to openly ignore the constraints caused by the official definition of organization in the relationship between politics and science.
In 1908, Shen Tongfang, who resigned, wrote a strategy for the three years of the Education Association. The facts show that in the past three years, Shen's biggest concern is how to compete for rights and resources with the authorities, that is, focusing on the relationship between the General Education Association and the political circles. In addition to his daily literary affairs, Shen Tongfang was also proud of his participation in the Creation and Political Research Association, saying: "I dare not call it political education, but how many people are willing to serve in addition to the members of the Education Association and the legal and political auditors? How many conflicts of ordinary knowledge are not unconscious, except for the above-mentioned personnel? Obviously, it is believed that the Law and Politics Research Association and the Law and Politics Training Institute have made great contributions to the cultivation of talents in a province that is close to the "parliamentary" nature of the jiangsu consultative bureau. Beyond that, however, he had no more "deeds" to flaunt, so he turned to his long self-defense. Faced with the question that the Federation had failed to promote the "popularization of education", he raised the rules and regulations and responded that the Association could only "assist the administrative organs" and "do not involve matters other than education according to the regulations". On the one hand, he regards the achievement of the initial politically intended goals of the "fandom" as an achievement within three years; on the other hand, he defends the limitedness of the achievement by the statutory limitations of the "legal organization", and in his view, in addition to the interaction between the various parties of the officials and gentry around the relationship between politics and science, it is difficult for the Education Federation to achieve commendable merits in other aspects.
In 1909, the Jiangsu Provincial Consultative Bureau was formally established. Although the Qing court did not use this as a Western-style "parliament", the Gentry of Jiangsu tended to think that the provincial consultative council was the provincial parliament, which meant that the goal of establishing a regional "parliament" as a "fan group" was basically achieved. The problem is that once the goal is achieved, the strength to unite the fans may be lost, and the organization may tend to be scattered, as the new resident officer Shen Enfu (Xin Qing, 1864-1944, a native of Wu County, Jiangsu Province) expressed this concern bluntly. If the Jiangsu Education Federation wants to maintain the initial attribute of "fandom", it needs to cultivate new goals for the organization. On this issue, Huang Yanpei (Ren Zhi, Yi Zuo Renzhi, 1878-1965, Jiangsu Chuansharen), who was 14 years younger than Shen Enfu, gave a new idea that focused on the relationship between politics and science.
Huang Yanpei
Two
Huang Yanpei's perception of the past meeting affairs is: the meeting Chinese mu is only "a lawsuit against the two", and the minutes of the meeting are only "rectifying difficulties", that is, focusing on coordinating the relationship between politics and academia and the internal relations of the education sector, which will not help the educational innovation itself. Nowadays, the "Master of Literati of the Eastern and Western States" actively pursues "academic theory", but people in China's education administration do not attach importance to it, then the General Education Association should take on the heavy responsibility of this "academic" research on its behalf.
This line of thinking was also permitted by the ministry, but the key is that the "academic theory" is how to reflect it in organizational behavior. In February of the year of His Unitary Year (1909), Huang Yanpei's good friend, Shanghai Longmen Normal Teacher and Attached Clerk Yang Baoheng (Yue Ru, 1873-1916, Jiangsu Chuansharen), Pudong Middle School Teacher and Attached Primary School Teacher Yu Zhiyi (Ziyi, 1886-1970, Wu County, Jiangsu, hereinafter referred to as Yu Ziyi), and Tongzhou Normal School graduate Zhou Weicheng (Jiefan, 1882-1918, Taicang, Jiangsu) were sent by the Jiangsu Education Federation to Japan to investigate education. After the three returned to China, they prompted Japanese education to "sharpen forward" and the academic theories were constantly refreshed, which reflected that although the Chinese education community also absorbed foreign theories, it was slow to respond to the "renewal" of the academic theories. This caused Huang Yanpei, who was deeply stimulated, to put forward a new goal for the future of the Federation: In foreign countries, when "the years send people to the east and the west, the exposition and consultation, and the record is reported to the meeting"; in China, when "the years send people to and from the counties in the north and south of the Jiangnan, the instructions and plans, the introduction of the old into the new, and the conscription of the elders to benefit", that is, the focus of "research" is to "renew", and the advanced overseas theories will be imported along the national, provincial, and provincial localities as soon as possible, and the general education association will "take the opportunity" to "maximize the effectiveness of metabolism." After this inspection, the Jiangsu Education Federation set up a "single-level professor practice center", which no longer focuses on political issues, but seeks to improve the educational method itself.
It should be pointed out that Huang Yanpei's early status in the Jiangsu Education Federation should not be overestimated. Huang only took the 1902 examination, and Jiangsu was the province with the largest number of scholars in the Qing Dynasty (and southern Jiangsu was the most concentrated), and the "gold content" of the name of the person was relatively limited within the province. According to the new academic standards, Huang only studied at Nanyang Public School for about a year in his early years, and then avoided going to Japan for some reason, only to learn Japanese at Tsinghua School, and did not officially study abroad. Shen Enfu, the resident officer, was also only a person, and he had only visited Japan at the end of the Qing Dynasty. In other words, the cultural cultivation and capital of Huang and Shen on both the old and new sides are not high or low, and with the indescribable family background, they can be roughly only regarded as "medium" intellectuals. However, since the end of the Qing Dynasty, it is precisely these "middle-class people" who have a more direct relationship with local school affairs (mainly middle and primary education), and their perception of teaching problems is more specific, and their network of relationships in the new education system is relatively more detailed. Therefore, although they still cannot avoid cross-border part-time work, the awareness of choosing their own "main" industry label from it may be stronger than that of the leaders of the general association who are jinshi Hanlin and high-ranking businessmen.
Moreover, the officers (including the resident officers) are the most frequent types of employees of the Jiangsu Education Association, which puts forward higher requirements for the convenience of staff attending the meeting. The "middle class" who has been active in Shanghai and its surrounding areas for a long time and does not have much official involvement has the advantage of being close to the water here. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Huang Yanpei ran schools in Chuansha and Pudong areas, and also had a network of Nanyang Public School (Cai Yuanpei was Huang's teacher in Nanyang Special Class), while Shen Enfu was in contact with Yuan Xitao (Guanlan, 1866-1930, a native of Baoshan, Jiangsu), Jia Fengzhen (Ji Ying, 1880?). -1945, Shanghai, Jiangsu) and others shared a network of classmates and colleagues from Shanghai Longmen Academy- Longmen Normal School and Jiangsu Provincial Second Normal School. In addition to expanding the power of the "nearest" Shanghai headquarters, it is also necessary to consider the connection between the Shanghai headquarters and other parts of the province. Here, Huang Yanpei has long served as an officer of the "Investigation Department" of the Central Committee, which has provided him with the convenience of his position to sit in Shanghai and connect with the educational circles in Jiangsu Province.
When the Xinhai Revolution broke out, Huang Yanpei participated in the restoration of southeast Guangdong and then served as the director of the Department of Education of Jiangsu Province. The Jiangsu Education Association has been renamed the "Jiangsu Provincial Education Association", the board of directors system has been abolished, and the setting of the two vice presidents has also been changed to one. After resigning in February 1914, Huang Yanpei was elected vice president at the annual meeting of the Suzhou Education Association in August of that year because of the prestige and contacts accumulated in the educational circles of Jiangsu Province and county during his stay as an official. Two years later, Shen Enfu, who resigned from the post of deputy director of the Civil Affairs Department of Suzhou Province, also served as the resident officer again. As for Zhang Xiao, although he served as the president from Minyuan to 1921, he was an official in Beijing from October 1913, and only resigned and went south before yuan shikai became emperor, and the focus of his career after that was also in his hometown of Nantong, and his participation in the affairs of the Su Education Association was lower than that of the late Qing Dynasty. In short, in the early years of the Republic of China, the prestige of the gentry and celebrities in a province devoted themselves to political affairs, which objectively made more room for the "middle class" in the education sector to rise. From 1914 to 1921, the people who spoke on behalf of the Su Education Association were usually Huang and Shen Zhuren, and the Su Education Association thus formed a situation in which the president of the association provided prestige, connections and umbrellas for the organization, and the vice president and resident officers held real power.
In this process, the evolution of organizational policy is mutually reinforcing and simultaneous with the change of power. During this period, the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association continued to expand as a "statutory organization", and some of the "middle-class" circles in the "fandom" were mainly Huang Yanpei's Pudong compatriots and colleague circles (including Yu Ziyi, Yang Baoheng, Zhang Zhihe, etc.) and the Shanghai Longmen Academy-Jiangsu Provincial Second Normal Circle (including Yuan Xitao, Yuan Xiluo, Wu Xin, Jia Fengzhen, etc.) including Shen Enfu. The formation of this situation is related to the fact that the action policy of Huang Yanpei and others in the late Qing Dynasty, which emphasizes academic renewal, was supported or tacitly approved by other dignitaries in the association, and gradually became the goal of the organization itself.
After resigning in 1914, Huang Yanpei officially broke through the scope of a province in China and carried out field investigations. Starting from Anhui, it went to Jiangxi and Zhejiang, and then went north to Shandong and The Beijing-Tianjin region in September of the same year. Huang Yanpei said that engaging in education in this way can be compared to "treating diseases": "foreign investigations, reading prescription books; domestic investigations, searching for the source of diseases", paper and field two-pronged approach, domestic and overseas complement each other, in order to strengthen pathology and pharmacological research, to achieve "the right medicine". Correspondingly, the following month (September 1914), the vice president of Huang Ren, the soviet education association officials immediately formulated five general rules attached to the "research society", and soon established various research associations such as English professors, primary education, science professors, teacher education, vocational education, etc. Most of these research associations are not directly related to politics, focusing on the knowledge theory of education itself.
Obviously, organizations such as the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association, which contact "front-line" educators in various places, can also provide key channels for the introduction and dissemination of academic principles. What specific problems exist in educational practice, and what kind of knowledge theory is more conducive to the intergenerational dissemination of knowledge and ideas, and the front-line workers in education also have at least no less than the right to speak to the editors of long-lived book and newspaper publishing institutions. In the first year of the Republic of China, upon the decision of the Jiangsu Provincial Assembly, the Jiangsu Provincial Authorities entrusted the Jiangsu Education Association to prepare for the establishment of a "book review meeting", with Yang Baoheng as the chief censor, and approved the books as temporary teaching materials for the province. The Jiangsu Provincial Education Association's own publishing career also made progress in the early Minchu. In addition to maintaining relations with major publishing institutions in Shanghai (such as the Commercial Press) and Shanghai newspapers (such as the Declaration and The Times), the Su Education Association itself launched the monthly journal "Educational Research" in May 1913. The purpose of this journal is as its title, the so-called "reason to be able to learn by reason and argument, to compete with each other and to be refined, the beauty and evil of a school, can be pushed to a province and a province and the whole country, and the rejuvenation of the revolution, its shu gradually become unified, and gradually reach the popularization?" "The focus is on the educational community's own network (rather than relying entirely on the platforms of large publishing institutions) to communicate with each other in order to jointly study the doctrine. The journal was changed to a quarterly periodical from the 26th issue (December 30, 1915), and then discontinued in September 1916, and the monthly newspaper of the Education Association was changed to "in case of research or special meetings", and a "temporary publication" was added.
The "Educational Research" Dodensu Education Fellow article has focused on promoting the concept of "pragmatism" vigorously advocated by Huang Yanpei and others. In March 1914, huang Yanpei and others published the "Pragmatic Primary School Education Law", which was translated from the Works of the Japanese and greatly revised, as a temporary supplement to the New Year's Edition of Educational Research. In addition, under the operation of Su Education Officer, Commercial Press Editor Zhuang Yu and others, Shanghai Education Magazine also launched a supplement with the theme of "pragmatism" in the same year. In 1915, Huang Yanpei personally went to the United States to investigate, after which he began to shift the label of the ideas he advocated from the more "abstract" "practical education" to the more "concrete" "vocational education". In 1917, Huang, Shen and others led the establishment of the "China Vocational Education Society", which was developed from the Vocational Education Research Association attached to the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association.
Summarizing the above, from the Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, under the comprehensive role of the legal status of the organization and the various elements such as people's own concepts and interpersonal relations in the organization, the dual attributes of the "fandom" and "legal organization" of the Su Education Association have been maintained. The leadership of the meeting also continued to deepen their understanding of the word "education" as a career sector, and their views on what should and could be done in this sector also tended to be clear. Education is no longer supposed to be directly directed to politics, no longer merely a vassal of politics, and the field of education itself should and can be used for people to cultivate and elaborately, which is the experience of some "middle" intellectuals who have not yet reached the top of politics but have long been engaged in local academic affairs, and it naturally contains the "rationalization" mechanism of their choices for their main causes.
Three
These original "middle-class" ambitions don't stop there. At the beginning of the People's Republic of China, the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association still intended to become a pivotal organization that communicated with various levels of domestic divisions and even the Chinese and foreign education circles, so as to facilitate the introduction of academic principles. In this regard, the strategy of actual leaders such as Huang and Shen is to fully combine the expansion of contacts with further organizational construction, and will "normalize" the breakthrough of the "regional" nature of the association.
One of the strategies is to jointly sponsor national societies or conferences with other organizations, which are not intended to be carried out here. The second strategy is to rely on Shanghai, a giant port in the southeast, to extend the organizational tentacles of the Su Education Association itself. Shortly after Huang Yanpei became the vice president, on October 9, 1914, the Su Education Association established a new "Communication Department". It is precisely in order to break the institutional positioning of the Association limited to the responsibilities of one province, and directly contact the foreign knowledge and education circles in Shanghai, Ningbo and other places (and can also touch the Chinese and foreign cultural and educational circles outside the province). Most of the people in the ministry work in schools in Shanghai and Nanjing, and many have studied abroad, while those who returned from the United States are obviously the most active in the communication department of the Soviet Education Association.
The first secretary of the Communication Department was Yu Rizhang (1882-1936, Puxi, Hubei). Yu Rizhang, a master of education from Harvard University, presided over the speech department of the National Association of Chinese YMCA (then known as the National Combination) in 1913, and later the Su Education Association set up a speech and study institute, with Yu Shi as the guide, based on the direct reference to the experience of the YMCA and students studying in the United States, the speech activities of the Su Education Association were vigorously carried out. In 1915, Huang Yanpei went abroad with the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce to visit the United States Industrial Group, and the then chief of agriculture and commerce was Zhang Xiao, president of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association, and the secretary of the industrial group was Yu Shi, which shows that this trip has the meaning of "self-directing and self-acting" in the Su Education Association, and Yu Shi is also in this "credits". In 1916, Yu became the director general of the Chinese YMCA. Back at the beginning of the establishment of the Communication Department of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association, Yu Rizhang wrote an English propaganda draft, "reporting on the progress achievements of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association in the past ten years, and announcing the purpose and methods of the Communication Department"; later, he sent similar English letters to four parties to contact the "feelings of Chinese and Western educators" inside and outside the province. Later, while continuing to publicize the affairs of the conference, the Ministry of Communications listened to the suggestions of foreign parties to plan new educational facilities, and imported knowledge and theories not limited to pedagogy, such as the various research societies attached to the Suzhou Education Association, many of which were set up with reference to foreign opinions.
An important officer of the Communications Department during this period was Guo Bingwen (Hongsheng, 1880-1969, Jiangpu, Jiangsu) who was stationed in Nanjing. Guo Bingwen graduated from Columbia University in 1914, the first doctor of education in China. After returning to China, Guo served as the academic director and acting principal of the Nanjing Higher Normal School established in August 1914 (at the end of August and the beginning of September 1919, he became the official principal). In addition, Guo's doctoral dissertation was published in the United States in 1915, and in 1916, the Shanghai Commercial Press launched a Chinese translation ("History of the History of China's Education System"), which was narrated by Huang Yanpei. In the name of the Soviet Education Association, he openly advocated exchanges and cooperation between Chinese and foreign schools. Other important communication department officers include Jiang Menglin (1886-1964, Yuyao, Zhejiang) stationed at the headquarters in Shanghai, and the details of this are to be presented separately.
As mentioned above, on the eve of May Fourth, those who stayed in the United States and returned to China and were active in the cultural and educational circles were not uncommon, except for Hu Shi and others who entered Peking University. To a large extent, this is the leader of the Su Education Association such as Huang and Shen who took the initiative to seek the support of this highly educated knowledge group, and enhanced the gold content and influence of their cultural and educational undertakings with the help of their academic qualifications, contacts and academic standards indicated by academic qualifications. Moreover, this is not just to ask international students to "stand on the platform", but to make them actually undertake the conference. By arranging work, contacting and publishing works (such as doctoral dissertations), the Su Education Association will help these international students to become the backbone members of other cultural and educational organizations in Jiangsu Province, and pull them into the position of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association within the boundaries of the organization and close to the center of power; the gathering of the backbone members of multiple organizations, including the Su Education Association, can be considered as the "internal" assembly of the Soviet Education Association, and the organization can lead or coordinate the joint action of multiple organizations with one organization, and the organization can strive for the ability of foreign-related parties to respond or cooperate. Therefore, there are more organizational structures to ensure that they are there.
Correspondingly, the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association introduced theories in the early years of the People's Republic of China, no longer blindly refusing to refuse, but more and more deliberately analyzing and flaunting the real "world trend" in between. In the late Qing Dynasty, Yang Baoheng, Yu Ziyi, and Zhou Weicheng went to Japan to investigate, and in his speech after returning to China, Zhou Weicheng said that the New Theory of Ou Xi, which was studied in Japanese education, can be summarized as the four theories of reform, society, compromise, and experimentation, of which "experimental theory" is "the latest theory of the present day" and the theory "because of various experiments in science to study the theory of education." By the beginning of the People's Republic, the leaders of the Soviet Education Association had become more and more firm in their belief that European and American theories were superior to Japan's, and they tried to further summarize the specific labels of "world trend" and related doctrinal genealogies on the basis of knowledge and information intake. At the same time, in order to improve a certain superficial and fragmented study situation, the results of pro-European and American investigations, the views of those with overseas high education, and the "appearance of Western scholars" have been paid special attention by the leaders of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association.
From 1912 to 1918, Huang Yanpei and others continued to be enthusiastic about overseas expeditions. Since the main battlefield of the First World War was in Europe, the field investigation objects of Jiangsu's educational circles began to further tilt towards "beauty" between "Europe" and "Beauty". The Soviet educational inspectors and students who have more contact with the United States mostly regard the education and related doctrines imported from Japan in the late Qing Dynasty as shallow, outdated or second-hand, and if they want to "catch up in a hurry and do not fall behind", they must directly attract the real "world trend" instead of relying on the East to change hands. This "new wave" label, including the pragmatism and vocational education vigorously advocated by Huang Yanpei and others, in addition to life education, instinct education, automatic (ism) education, civilian (ism) education and other names, these names are interrelated, and can be extended to the doctrine of socialism that later entered the field of vision, the main purpose is to emphasize that education should be close to "society" or "life", pay attention to cultivating students' "personality" and "autonomy" and "automatic" ability in methods, highlight and elevate the initiative of the student side in the teaching process and results. In addition, this also involves the introduction of philosophy, ethics, psychology and other disciplines of knowledge and theory; it is only necessary to explain that based on the understanding of the leaders of the Soviet Education Association for academic research, the key to drawing on foreign doctrines is not to seek refinement and depth, but to ensure speed and broadcast them "out of date" in the sea. Correspondingly, U.S. resources began to stand out in the genealogy of scholars and doctrines that they were accustomed to speaking of, including Dewey, who later became known as the "experimentalist" philosopher and educator. Generally speaking, by the eve of the "May Fourth", compared with peking university, Beijing and Shanghai "research departments" still have a considerable intake of British, French, German, Russian and other countries' ideological and theoretical principles, the "national" label of the Soviet Education Association to attract foreign academic resources seems to be more single and distinct; the reason why the US resources can be in a prominent position in the national cultural and educational trend before the "May Fourth" should not be ignored with the help of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association.
From another point of view, attracting new waves overseas is ultimately to deal with China's own problems. Here, overseas mainly provide "prescriptions", and the main ones in China are still showing "diseases", although prescriptions must be adapted to local conditions, and the existing ideas and theories in The sea are not without merit, but it is almost in doubt that Chinese culture and education as a whole must change with the external trend of "new" as much as possible. Huang Yanpei once made it clear that "the world's new wave" and "since the wind and lightning strike, where the truth is, there is no resistance", under the pressure or infection of this trend, "our people will have a day of great enlightenment", and the duty of "my generation" is to "do my best, summon early awareness, and do not fall into the wrong way for a long time". He believes that the "trend" of the world can only be greeted and cannot be rejected, and then he occupies the position of a "pre-consciousness" person in China and the consciousness of "hindsight" is not inferior to that of Sun Yat-sen and other revolutionaries.
After the end of the First World War, an atmosphere of national innovation began to form in China. In December 1918, the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association, together with Peking University, Nanjing Higher Normal School, Jinan School and China Vocational Education Society, established the "China New Education Society" in the Shanghai Su Education Association, with Jiang Menglin as the director. Among them, Peking University is represented by President Cai Yuanpei and Huang Yanpei, Su Education Association is also represented by Shen Enfu, and other representatives are Guo Bingwen, acting president of Nanjing High School, Zhao Zhengping, president of Jinan, and Yu Rizhang, representative of China Vocational Education Society, all of whom are members of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association. It can be seen that the founding meeting of this association in the name of "Zhonghua" is actually "contracted" by the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association, and a provincial-level organization can obtain formal authorization from multiple parties to openly "represent" the whole country. Soon the society changed its name to "New Education Gongjin Society", and in February 1919, it launched the monthly magazine "New Education" in Shanghai, with Jiang Menglin as the "backbone" (that is, the main editor). The inaugural manifesto stated that it is necessary to "issue a sound and evolutionary speech and broadcast a sound and conclusive doctrine in this new era", and its desire to connect all parties and take advantage of a certain overseas "momentum" to promote the overall innovation of culture and education in The Sea is clearly visible.
Fourteenth Year of the Republic of China (1925) New Education Magazine
At the end of April 1919, Dewey was invited to China by Guo Bingwen, Tao Zhixing, Hu Shi, Jiang Menglin and others, and the first stop of his speech in China was the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association in Shanghai. The 3rd issue of The New Education, Volume 1, is the "Dewey", which introduces the doctrine of Dewey in various disciplines to the Chinese people. Later, Huang Yanpei traced the process of innovation sought by the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Ming Dynasty, and established a direct connection with the new wave of culture and education in Europe and the United States, giving a clue of change from uniformity and serious education to the development of individuality, as well as from books, false name education to "pragmatism" that pays attention to social life. Dewey's personal visit to China elevated the earlier "verbal writing" and scale-and-half-clawed academic research to "the guidance of exploring the poor sources." It is necessary to "explore the root of the poor", and the academic theory involved should not be limited to education; and the history of the knowledge and thought acceptance of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association has also been constructed as a process that is constantly becoming systematic and methodical, and therefore constantly approaching the "new wave" essence of the world it believes.
Of course, the timely updating of education-related theories and the close pursuit of the selected new wave of culture and education in the world have almost become the organizational character of the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association, which does not mean that its original intention of involving politics has been completely abandoned. This aspect of the performance, which focuses on the topic of "local self-government", is limited in space and will not be expanded here. In short, when people studying cultural and educational organizations between the late Qing Dynasty and May Fourth, it is not appropriate to regard the rise and evolution of organizations as a "natural" part of a certain overall ideological and educational trend without thinking. In fact, organizational behavior is both in the midst of the trend and can act on the trend itself. The Jiangsu Provincial Education Association does not have the legal status of Peking University as the highest institution of learning in the country, and the actual leadership of the organization in the early years of the Republic of China was further grasped by a group of "middle-class people" with high cultural capital. However, the organization was able to maintain and even expand its influence in the south-east and beyond, and further used this influence to highlight certain tendencies in the cultural and educational innovation of the country. The reason for this is related to the construction of an active organization. This examination of the change of organizational power, structural adjustment, and change of goals will help us to further understand the changes in people's understanding of what modern "education" organizations should do and what they can do on the eve of May Fourth.
(The paper "Organizational Evolution and Cultural and Educational Innovation: The Jiangsu Provincial Education Association between the Late Qing Dynasty and May Fourth" was first published in Shi Lin, No. 3, 2021.) This article has been rewritten by the author and authorized to be published by The Paper, and the annotations are omitted. ）
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