精英流动与中国引入近代教育的首次尝试——兼论科举制度对中国近代教育改革的阻碍

在19世纪,中国饱受了外来侵略,国内的行政和社会处于崩溃边缘。知识分子与执政精英之间形成了一个共识:即为了挽救国家,他们必须考虑前所未有的改革。鉴于儒家政治传统的重负和人才是有效性管理的关键,改革所采取的方式是建立能够培养出更好地应付一套新型问题的人才和系统。由于中国已经具有一个漫长而古老的传统的教育和招募官吏的机制,这使得问题变得复杂化。传统系统实际上是学生与资源的一种竞争,它很大程度上满足了服务大部分中国人的需要。改革家很快发现,建设新系统不容易,建设新系统必须在传统系统这一特定背景和领域内发展。所以,中国的第一次实施教育和官吏招募的改革遇到了强大的阻力。中国的传统教育和科举制度成为近代教育改革的巨大阻碍。

Elite Mobility and Chinas First Attempts to Introduce Modern Education

In the 19th century,as China suffered from foreign invasion and internal administrative and social collapse,a consensus emerged among the nation’s intellectual and political elites: in order to save the nation they would have to consider unprecedented reforms.Given the weight of the Confucian political tradition that held human ability to be the key to effective governance,it is no surprise that the first steps toward reform were taken in the direction of training men to manage the new set of problems.However,because China already possessed a venerable educational tradition and a well-established system for recruiting officials,it was inevitable that reform would be complicated: reformers quickly discovered that it was not easy to build new institutions.Their first efforts to introduce new schools encountered a great deal of resistance because the schools had to compete with systems that already served the interests of elite Chinese very well.This paper examines the reformers’ earliest attempts to reform China’s educational system and demonstrates that China’s educational tradition and examination system together constituted a major obstacle to the accomplishment of the reformers’ objectives.