ABSTRACT
HISTORY OF MORAL EDUCATION IN CHINA In order to appreciate the current Chinese moral education curriculum, it is necessary to examine the historical, social, and political influences that have molded and shaped its modern form. Throughout most of China’s 5,000 years of history, ideological shifts in conceptions of morality were often accompanied by political policy change and reform. For example, Confucianism emerged as a Chinese philosophy during the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history (771 BC-476 BC), and was then regarded as the orthodoxy since the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) up to the Communist revolution. During the period following the Communist revolution, Confucianism was dismantled and replaced by socialist ideology based on Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, the official Ideology of the ruling Communist Party of China. After Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” policy at the end of the 1970s, China’s economy started booming as capitalist ideas and materialism took its hold on the country. Material gain and the accumulation of personal wealth became the overarching emphasis amongst the population. These changes further brought to light issues of corruption, often popularized in the growing national media, and similar efforts by the ruling Communist Party to address these pervasive social problems. In this atmosphere, many people started questioning the lack of morality in their day-to-day lives and started turning back to the teachings of Confucianism for answers (Ai, 2008; Yu, 2008). Accordingly, we will attempt to understand how social and political changes in various historical periods have also changed and shaped the form and hence the practice of the current moral curriculum in China. Reform policy scholars have generally divided the development of Chinese moral education into four periods of development: 1) before 1949; 2) between 1949 and 1966, when the first education reform happened after the establishment of the PRC; 3) between 1966 and 1976 when the Cultural Revolution suspended schooling altogether; and 4) after 1976 when the reform and opening up policy was implemented (e.g., M. Li, Taylor, & Yang, 2004; P. Li., Zhong, Lin, & Zhang, 2004). (New educational reforms begun in 2003, i.e., the “Guidelines,” to be subsequently described, may be considered extensive enough to have opened up a new chapter in the development of moral education in China.) Since the end of the first historical reference point until current times, China has transformed from a closed, conservative, authoritarian society to a more open, diverse, and modern society. Each of these four periods significantly shaped moral education development in China. During the first period following the establishment of the PRC, moral education, or deyu, was a means of political socialization used to uphold the socialist government. Gradually moral education partially delinked itself from politics and currently its focus-at least officially-is to serve the development of students and, by extension, to strengthen society.
