The Transformation of the World (171 page)

In 1912 Japan was one of the world leaders in literacy. In China, where the standard textbook went back to 500 AD, the literacy rate seems to have stagnated in the nineteenth century, though at a comparatively high level for a premodern society. For many centuries, China had shown great reverence for the written word and refined calligraphy that permitted the dissemination of all
manner of books, and the flourishing of a varied landscape of private education as well as community, welfare, clan, and temple schools little regulated (and by no means systematically shaped) by the government. During the greater part of the nineteenth century, most of these were one-teacher schools rooted in a local initiative; their organizers could draw on a huge pool of some five million people with a training in high culture, who, having failed at some stage in the state examination system, were excluded from the status group of title bearers and often worked as home tutors for upper-class families.
⁴⁸
For want of statistics, we have to rely on good-quality anecdotal evidence, and this does permit the conclusion that 30 to 45 percent of the male and 2 to 10 percent of the female population had at least basic reading and writing skills.
⁴⁹
This did not mean, of course, that they met the high standards of elite communication, but they understood a basic repertory of written characters and therefore edicts and proclamations of a hortatory, admonitory, or interdictory nature that the government issued to its subjects, and often also simplified versions of classical texts. The imperial state made some commitment to education and the funding of schools, but without asserting the kind of general authority in the matter that slowly developed in Europe during the nineteenth century. For centuries the legitimacy of the political and social order had rested on the fact that access to education, and hence to status and prosperity, was not reserved only for the offspring of upper-class families. Possibilities of upward movement therefore had to be kept open, such as those offered at least by the church in early modern Europe. Practices on the ground were quite flexible: for example, elementary education for peasant children was concentrated in months when there was no work to be done in the fields.

Why Did China's Culture of Education Fall Behind?

The Chinese elementary school system, like the institutional arrangements for education in general, did not keep abreast of international competitors in the nineteenth century. The traditional system, efficient though it was in many respects, contained no potential for modernization (unlike the Tokugawa system in Japan). The imperial government itself recognized this after a long period of hesitation. In 1904 it issued a national schools ordinance and declared its intention to build a countrywide, three-tier educational system modeled on those of the West and above all Japan (which in turn had used Europe as its template). One year later, the old system of status assignment and civil service recruitment through state examinations was abruptly discontinued, with little or no provision for transitional measures.
⁵⁰
Korea—the third Asian country after China and Vietnam with an old tradition of state exams—had executed a similar radical step in 1894, an astonishingly early date.
⁵¹
The collapse of central state power in China, beginning with the 1911 revolution and unstoppable throughout the period of the Republic (until 1949), frustrated the plans that had been worked out at the turn of the century. If China's educational system today is highly differentiated and efficiency oriented, having successfully blended assistance from
abroad with the country's own resources to rise up the international rankings, this is mainly a result of state policy after 1978. The gap that appeared around 1800 has now been corrected, two hundred years later. But how did that gap come about? Three reasons suggest themselves:

First
. The traditional education system was shaped entirely “from above” and geared to state examinations. Even if the great majority of peasant schoolchildren were not expected to undergo one day the full rigors of the examination procedures, they did have to memorize the simpler writings of the Confucian canon as soon as they had learned a basic stock of characters. This unitary conception of education left no room for the particular skills required by various layers of the population. It is true that—in contrast to the modern European notion (now highly developed in China too) of school as a special space removed from ordinary life—a dense web of connections integrated schools into everyday existence. But the subject matter was frozen into a curriculum increasingly divorced from practical concerns—an obvious definite loss of creativity in comparison with earlier times, when the curriculum had repeatedly been a hotly debated bone of contention.

Second
. The failure of China's educational system to keep up with its international rivals first became evident when the previously uncontested empire began to suffer military defeats after 1842. But it took decades before an analysis was made of the reasons for China's military weakness and economic stagnation. For the scholar-officials who governed and administered the empire, nothing was more difficult than to admit that the education to which they owed their social rank and personal identity could be somehow to blame, or that adjustments were required to meet the new challenges. The superiority of Western knowledge (
xixue
) in some domains was soon recognized, but there was an unwillingness to grant equal value to Western culture as such. The fact that aggressors and invaders were the bearers of the new knowledge, and that Christian missionaries in the forefront often behaved without the necessary tact, contributed to the general sense of mistrust. After 1860, small circles of Chinese opened up intellectually to the West, and the state established a number of translation bureaus. But a sterile counterposition of Chinese to Western knowledge became a dogma among the majority of literati in the second half of the nineteenth century.
⁵²
When after the turn of the century the mood shifted into one of acute national crisis, Chinese tradition came to be seen as deeply problematic. Elements of Western knowledge were imported as a matter of urgency (mainly via a grudgingly admired Japan); the Japanese educational system (or anyway some of its elements) was hastily adopted in a spirit of panic. Throughout the period of the Republic (1912–49), Chinese intellectuals and educational reformers wrestled with the problem of how to assimilate and integrate knowledge from diverse sources. Some tried to salvage valuable parts of the tradition by scrutinizing and cleansing them with the methods of source criticism, while others looked for salvation either in Bolshevik-inspired anti-Western Marxism or in full-scale Westernization. Given
the weakness of the Chinese state, however, no solutions of any kind could be converted into policies applicable to all parts of the country. The basic intellectual and educational problems of the nineteenth century would have to be tackled anew in the People's Republic after 1949.

Third
. The late imperial state would have had neither the administrative nor the financial resources to take charge of education. The size of the country, the traditional underdevelopment of religious/church education as a third way between the private home and state institutions, the weak presence of the bureaucracy at village level, and the deficient fiscal base of the central government together conspired to rule out resolute policies along the lines of Meiji Japan.
⁵³

School State and State Schooling

A discussion that starts with literacy as a knowledge indicator soon broadens out into a comparative account of institutional education as a whole. Here we may draw two general conclusions. On the one hand, it was only in the nineteenth century that the many forms of practical learning and moral instruction in society came to be thought of, and actually organized, as an educational
system
. The idea that schools should have a standard form and be connected by a common syllabus, that pupils should pass through classes grouped by age, that teachers should receive a professional training and have the appropriate qualifications, that special ministries should direct and monitor changes to the system: all this acquired practical importance in Europe and elsewhere only in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the state—in competition with private bodies, including religious communities—began to aim for a monopoly in the education of children and young people of compulsory school age. In many countries, such as the Netherlands, a deep political gulf developed over whether the state or the church should control education. A state monopoly took a long time to come into effect even in centralist France, while in some leading Western societies such as the United States or Britain it never came close to being achieved. Today it is being increasingly undermined by private schools in mainland Europe too and is certainly not a distinctive feature of “the West” as a whole. It was taken furthest in the socialist party dictatorships of the twentieth century—one among few achievements brightening up their historical record. Since the state relaxed its grip in the 1990s, even the People's Republic of China has experienced a dramatic rise in the number of illiterates (those unable to read at least 1,500 characters).
⁵⁴

The state's claim to sovereign control over the formal education of young people was a revolutionary innovation of the nineteenth century. Children from the lower and middle strata of society entered state schools for the first time, while those from rich families were more often educated together in special institutions rather than by private tutors at home. The state became a “school state,” society a “school society”—as historian Thomas Nipperdey put it with reference to the German lands.
⁵⁵
The trend was most evident there, but it made itself felt
worldwide; Germany—especially Prussia—became the closely observed model to be copied elsewhere. It was Prussia's organizational and bureaucratic measures that counted most here, rather than the idealistic ambition of its early reform period to reinvent Prussia as a
Bildungsstaat
. Such noble policy objectives were a thing of the past by midcentury.
⁵⁶
Governments around the world had various aims and priorities in their development of public education: to discipline the population, to shape “model citizens” for a “model state,”
⁵⁷
to improve military effectiveness, to create a homogeneous national culture, to integrate empires culturally, to promote economic development by raising the skill levels of “human capital.” To be sure, such a top-down perspective needs to be set alongside the view from below. Whatever the intentions of the state elite, people in many societies around the world saw in education the promise of upward mobility and a better life. This translated into a demand for opportunities that could be satisfied by the state, the church, or private philanthropy—or else by self-help.

Colonial governments were the least ambitious and forthcoming. At the minimalist end of the spectrum, they showed no concern at all for education and left the initiative entirely to missionaries. This was the case in the Congo Free State (after 1908, Belgian Congo), where at the onset of decolonization in 1960, after some eighty years of colonial rule, there was virtually no European-educated elite and only patches of literacy in a few local languages. The situation looked better in colonies such as Nigeria (British since 1851/62) or Senegal (French since 1817), but secondary schools were very thin on the ground. In Algeria a state education system competed with Koranic schools that the colonial authorities found very difficult to control: an educational dualism, in fact.
⁵⁸
The other extreme was represented by the Philippines, under US control from 1898 on, which by 1919 already boasted 50 percent literacy. The main European colonies in Asia had much lower rates: 8 percent in Indonesia, 10 percent in French Indochina, and 12 percent in British India.
⁵⁹

India was in some ways exceptional: the colonial regime promoted middle and higher education even in the period before the First World War, although the number of schoolchildren and students who benefited from it was fairly small in comparison with the huge population. The Hindu College in Calcutta opened its doors as early as 1817; universities followed in 1857 in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras; 1882 in Lahore; and 1887 in Allahabad. They were not fully fledged teaching and research universities, however, but essentially institutes that awarded grades and diplomas to students scattered among all manner of colleges in the region; teaching took place only at Lahore University. The colleges taught little else than the “liberal arts,” since the British were interested mainly in developing a culturally Anglicized Indian stratum that could be involved in administering the country. Science and technology occupied a much humbler place. Only after Lord Curzon, then the viceroy of India, pushed through the Indian Universities Act in 1904 did some Indian universities create research departments—including in princedoms such as Baroda and Hyderabad that
were not subject to the Raj bureaucracy and sometimes had ambitious modernization plans of their own. Insofar as research in India took place under the aegis of British rule, it was strongly oriented to practical applications; theory and pure research had a harder time. Sciences such as botany (which had uses in agriculture) received the greatest encouragement.
⁶⁰

Independent Asian governments saw things differently and sought to develop the sciences on a broad base. In Japan the importance of technical skills was understood early on, while in China a few reformers fought unsuccessfully for decades against the pride in “humanist culture” of a majority of officials. Science and technology were given major importance only in a number of American missionary schools and universities founded after 1911 in Beijing and Shanghai. In the Ottoman Empire, where many architecturally imposing new schools had been built, similar trends came into conflict with one another. The question was whether higher education should serve mainly to give civil servants a training based in Islam or to cultivate practical, “productive” individuals versed in technology and economics? Until the turn of the century it was the former that prevailed.
⁶¹
As in China (much less in Japan), foreign educational institutions in the Ottoman Empire, often run by missionaries, competed heavily with government initiatives. They offered foreign languages and in many cases had a better reputation than public schools. The presence of foreign schools and universities was less a sign of imperialist cultural aggression than an inducement for the indigenous state to widen and improve its own educational opportunities.
⁶²
It would be wrong, however, to draw conclusions regarding “the Muslim world” as a whole. Until the first decade of the twentieth century, the kind of educational reforms that had already visibly changed Egypt and the Ottoman Empire were almost completely lacking in Iran. There, in the second largest noncolonial Muslim country in the world, the state did not interfere with the near-total control that the
ulama
retained over schooling.
⁶³