Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how "Si-shu," a traditional form of local, private education grounded in classical instruction, responded to the rapid modernization of education during the late Qing dynasty and early Republic of China and to explain why these schools, once extraordinarily adaptable, finally disappeared.…

Purpose: This paper examines China's historiography on foreign education since 1900, with an emphasis on the period since 1949. The understanding of "foreign education" in China during this period shifted rapidly from the Western-centered approach that had been introduced from Japanese during the late Qing dynasty and the Republic of…

Purpose: This paper traces the incorporation of western educational histories in the development of normal-school curricula during the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China (1901-1944). It uses publication networks to show how the study of comparative educational history facilitated the international circulation of knowledge in the teaching…

Purpose: This essay focuses on the Chinese-Japanese Library of the Harvard-Yenching Institute and examines how the Library collected and transported Chinese rare books to the United States during the 1930 and 1940s. It considers Harvard's rationale for its collection of Chinese books and tensions between Chinese scholars and the Harvard-Yenching…

Purpose: Some studies have claimed that Chinese thinker Hu Shi (or Hu Shih) received and responded to John Dewey's educational ideas only at a theoretical level and did little for education at a practical level. This paper reexamines Hu's reception of Dewey's ideas with a focus on how he used those ideas to solve China's educational and social…