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长沙市博物馆Britain and Japan: Two roads to higher education
彼岸花是什么意思Britain and Japan are the two great pioneers of industrialism and therefore ofthe modern world. Britain was the pioneer industrial nation of the Western, European-dominated world, Japan of the Eastern, non-European and, to many eyes, the hope of the Third World. The countries have always had much in common. Both groups of islands off an initially more civilized and powerful continent, they had to defend themlves from military and cultural conquest and to that end developed a powerful navy and an independence of mind which made them increasingly different from their continental neighbours. Behind their a defences they were able to pursue their own ideals and ambitions which enabled them in the end to originate changes in industry and society which, becau they brought wealth and power, others tried to imitate. The British at the height of their imperial power and economic domination recognized in the emerging Japane a fellow pioneer and an ally. They called her 'the Britain of the East' and in the 1902 Treaty were the first to recognize Japan as a world power.
Yet the two countries took utterly different roads to industrialism, power and wealth. Britain, the first industrial nation, evolved slowly without knowing - becau nobody then knew what an Industrial Revolution was - where she was going or what the end of modernization would be. Japan, coming late to economic growth in a world which saw and felt only too clearly what the gains and dangers of industrialism were, adopted it lf-consciously and with explosive and revolutionary speed. And they still bear the marks of the differences of origin, timing and approach. Britain had the first Industrial Revolution becau she had the right kind of society to generate it; but for that very reason she was riot forced to change her society as much as later developing countries, and she now has the wrong kind of society for sustaining a high and continuing rate of economic growth. That does not mean that she has the wrong kind of society to provide a highly civilized and comfortable life for her people. On the contrary, just as the British were pioneers of the industrial society dominated by a gospel of work so they may now be the pioneers of the post-industrial society dedicated to the gospels of leisure and welfare.家庭困难
和谈Japan on the other hand has astonished the world by the degree to which she was prepa
red to change her society in order to industrialize, and the speed at which, in less than a hundred years, she transformed herlf from a feudal society of samurai, artisans and peasants into one of the most efficient industrial and egalitarian meritocracies in the world. However, it must be said that Tokugawa Japan was no ordinary feudal society, and had hidden advantages for industrial development which most feudal societies lack: one of the most urbanized populations in the world, with a highly educated ruling class of efficient bureaucrats, large numbers of skilled craftsmen and sophisticated merchants, and a more literate populace than most other countries, even in the West. But the fact remains that the leaders of the Meiji Restoration were prepared to abolish feudalism, establish equality before the law, and make everyone, rich or poor, samurai, worker or peasant, contribute to the survival and development of the country.
If the British and Japane roads to industrialism were different, their two roads to higher education were even more different. The British educational road was far slower, more indirect and evolutionary even than their road to industrial development and, indeed, in the early stages had little connection with economic growth. The ancient universities, part
icularly in England as distinct from Scotland, had become little more than finishing schools for young gentlemen, chiefly landowners' sons and young clergymen. They did not conduct rearch and not one of the major inventions of the early Industrial Revolution originated in a university. Oxford and Cambridge were even less important to English society when the Industrial Revolution began than they were over a century earlier - many of the ruling elite came to find little to interest them in the repetition of classical Greek and Latin texts.
When Japan was beginning its great transformation under the Meiji, the main contribution of the British universities to economic growth was still in the future. It may em surprising that, in relation to industrial development and modernization, British higher education in the late 19th century was no more advanced than the new Japane system. By 1900 university students in both Britain and Japan were less than one per cent of the student age group. In both countries higher education was exclusively for the elite, but whereas in Britain the elite graduates went predominantly into the home civil rvice, colonial government and the traditional professions, in Japan they went not only i
发烧拉肚子nto the but still more into industry and commerce and the newer technological professions.
刘学景This was becau Japane higher education, like the whole modern education system, was created by the Meiji reformers for the express purpo of modernizing Japan. Japan, contrary to popular belief in the West, did not start from scratch. Under the Tokugawa there were higher schools and colleges bad on Confucian learning, no more out of touch with the needs of a traditional ruling elite than were Oxford and Cambridge. But the difference was that the Meiji elite 普洱茶的喝法knew that higher education had to be changed, and changed radically if Japan was to be transformed into a modern nation able to expel the barbarians and become a strong and wealthy country. Under the Fundamental Code of Education of 1872 they t out to establish a modern system of education with an elementary school within reach of every child, a condary school in every school district, and a university in each of eight academic regions. In the next forty years, Japane higher education expanded explosively. By 1922 there were 6 imperial and 20 non-imperial universities and 235 other higher institutions. Moreover, the whole system was g
eared to industrialization and economic growth, to the production of bureaucrats, managers, technologists and technicians. Whereas in Britain the sons of the elite at this stage avoided industry, which was left to the largely lf-educated, trained in industry itlf, in Japan the sons of the Shizoku, the ex-samurai who formed the majority of students in the universities, went indiscriminately into the rvice of the state and of private industry.
