The Historical Significance of China's Modern Education and Thought Development

On the one hand, introduce and learn the democratic and scientific ideas of the western bourgeoisie. However, in modern China, the feudal education thought, represented by Confucian education thought, became increasingly corrupt, which became an ideological obstacle to the development of modern bourgeois education and set off a counter-current of retro again and again. Therefore, inheriting and carrying forward the fine tradition of China's ancient educational thought is always carried out in the struggle of exposing and criticizing feudal old education and decadent retro education thought. The study of western bourgeois education thought was carried out under the conditions of foreign powers' armed invasion and colonial expansion. In this way, inheriting fine traditions is always intertwined with opposing feudal retrospection, learning new knowledge from the western bourgeoisie and opposing imperialist aggression, which will inevitably lead to difficulties and twists in the development of bourgeois education in China, and at the same time, it will easily lead to the distortion and deformation of bourgeois education thoughts in China. After the Opium War, both the peasant bourgeois education thoughts represented by Hong Xiuquan and Hong Rengan, the westernization education thoughts represented by Li Hongzhang and Zhang Zhidong, and the bourgeois reformist education thoughts represented by Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and Yan Fu all have this feature. Nevertheless, bourgeois education thought is the mainstream of the development of world education thought, and it is necessary to seek the trend of social progress and education development in China. Therefore, it has gradually occupied a dominant position. Until the May 4th New Culture Movement, the bourgeois democratic revolutionaries represented by Sun Yat-sen and Cai Yuanpei pushed China's bourgeois education thought to a peak, thus forming a scientific and democratic bourgeois revolutionary education thought against imperialism and feudalism. It can be said that inheriting the tradition and learning from the west have always been two major themes in the development of China's modern educational thought.