ABSTRACT
To understand education and psychology in the People’s Republic of China, one must have some information about the history of this country. The People’s Republic of China came into being on October 1, 1949. Prior to 1949, Chinese educational philosophy contained a strong Confucian element along with some influence from Dewey. Yee (1973) noted that before 1949, psychology in China had a distinctly western influence, and the ideas of Dewey were subscribed to by a large number of psychologists. Dewey’s concepts of an active learning process, the relatedness rather than the separateness of stimulus and response, and the view of mind as descriptive of problem solving (McDonald, 1964) were some of the ideas that Chinese students, who were educated in the United States during the period, came into contact with. The Confucian emphasis on morality and the virtues of kindness, uprightness, decorum, wisdom, and faithfulness provided basic precepts on which education was based. Perhaps the most important contribution of Confucius was his thinking about the effects of postnatal influences on mental development. Over 2,500 years ago, he proposed a relationship between nature and nurture. According to Liu (1982), Confucius suggested that people are alike because of nature, whereas their differences are the result of practice. This Confucian idea was developed further by scholars who followed him. In their refinement of Confucian thought, they recognized the contribution of innate factors to mental development, but they also emphasized that experience, in the form of education, contributed more to mental development than innate factors (Liu, 1982).
