Russian and Chinese Educational Reforms in the Second Half of the 19th Century: A Comparative Analysis

This article presents a comparative historical analysis of Chinese and Russian policies in modernizing their respective education systems in the 1860s and 1880s. A comparison of the reformist courses in education is conducted according to the following criteria: the foreign policy circumstances and reasons that necessitated the transformations; the reformers’ formulation of the goals for the planned changes; the attitude towards external institutional and substantive borrowing from European experience in organizing education systems; conceptual approaches to defining the relationship between innovations and traditions; the methods and means of state stimulation for the further development of educational institutions; and the social orientation of the reforms, considering the specific features of the social structure of society and the shortage of teaching personnel. As a result of the comparative analysis of the governmental policies of China and Russia in the field of education, several significant similarities and differences have been identified. As part of the government’s “self-strengthening” policy, a peculiar concept of borrowing emerged, according to which the achievements of European science in the learning process were to be used only as a tool to accelerate technical development and increase the country’s defense capability while preserving the traditional foundations of the Confucian model of education. The reform did not entail a large-scale societal transformation through the introduction of new educational institutions. This was clearly manifested in the content of education, the social structure of students, and the territorial location of the new schools. In contrast to China, Russia implemented reforms that enhanced its existing system of educational institutions. The history of the drafting and the content of the “Statute on Primary Public Schools”, the “Charter of Gymnasiums and Progymnasiums”, and the “General Charter of Imperial Russian Universities” make it possible to conclude that, during the preparation and implementation of the reforms, the government took an active interest in the organizational issues of education systems in a number of European countries. Along with the understanding of the need for a clear differentiation of curricula based on the school level (primary, secondary, and higher), it was also recognized that Russian society had its own political and social structure which needed to be taken into consideration. The article concludes by drawing a comparison between the goals, methods, and scale of education systems developed in Russia and China during the second half of the nineteenth century.