The period of enlightenment in East Asia was an era of change in which new philosophy and scholarship, technologies and culture entered the region. There were movements to both reject and protect the values and traditions of the pre-enlightenment era....
The period of enlightenment in East Asia was an era of change in which new philosophy and scholarship, technologies and culture entered the region. There were movements to both reject and protect the values and traditions of the pre-enlightenment era. Japan, which had begun the civilization and enlightenment movement first, brought in legal and government systems from the West. These systems quickly influenced education. Scholarship in East Asia consisted of memorization and recitation of the Confucian classics; importation of Western academics greatly changed this paradigm. In this social milieu, the meaning of a Confucian education was brought into question, with some dissenters even claiming that it impeded the progress of society. Debates culminated in the advocacy of elimination of classical Chinese altogether. In this paper I will be focusing on classical Chinese education and classical Chinese textbooks compare with education policy in the Japanese colonial period (1922~1938).