Education and Society in Late Imperial China: 1600-1900.

• Author: Struve, Lynn

This eagerly awaited volume is the product of a conference on Ming- and Ch'ing-period education, principally funded by the A.C.L.S. and held in Santa Barbara in June of 1989. The conference organizers, Benjamin Elman and Alexander Woodside, have served ably as editors of this collection of substantial scholarly articles, each of which (we are thankful) features East Asian scripts in separate end-notes and glossaries. In the introduction we learn that "contributors were asked to address education in China as a prism of analysis for delineating in precise terms the complex relation between Confucian educational theory and actual processes of education, learning, and socialization," and "to probe beneath the educational ideals enunciated by Neo-Confucian philosophers to get a more precise historical glimpse of how education actually was practiced in China ..." (p. 3). The results, indeed, have been precise and probing, and readers, after being stimulated by that for over five hundred pages, will indeed feel that they have had but a glimpse of an immense subject.

Part one of the volume, "Education, Family, and Identity," gives us three quite different perspectives on the expectations of senior family members toward the education of their juniors. Here, the article by Susan Mann, "The Education of Daughters in the Mid-Ch'ing Period," is especially fresh and engaging. Mann first points out that, whereas the ranks of courtesans long had included many who were highly skilled in belles lettres and painting, only in the Ch'ing period did married women come to dominate female activity in the elite arts.

More central to Mann's article, however, is the "world of signs and symbols" in which all females, from birth to death, whether they were literate or not, were inculcated with the role-values of marriage, childbearing, and women's work. In "Four School-masters: Educational issues in Li Hai-kuan's Lamp at the Cross-roads," Allan Barr sets the favorable and unfavorable portrayals of schoolteachers and private tutors found in a middle-brow didactic novel, the Ch'i-lu teng (written 1748-77), against a backdrop of our current knowledge of eighteenth-century educational conditions. He also compares the author's sanguine views of proper instruction and socialization of the young to the more dissenting, satirical tone of the better-known, earlier eighteenth-century work, The Scholars (Ju-lin wai-shih). And in "Education for Its Own Sake: Notes on Tseng...