Education and society in late imperial China, 1600-1900 / edited by Benjamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside.

Papers originally presented at a conference held at Santa Barbara, Calif., June 8-14, 1989, sponsored by the Joint Committee on Chinese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The education of daughters in the mid-Ch'ing period / Susan Mann -- Four schoolmasters : educational issues in Li Hai-kuan's Lamp at the crossroads / Allan Barr -- Education for its own sake : notes on Tseng Kuo-fan's Family letters / Kwang-Ching Liu -- Changes in Confucian civil service examinations from the Ming to the Ch'ing dynasty / Benjamin A. Elman -- Fang Pao and the Ch'in-ting Ssu-shu-wen / R. Kent Guy -- Disclosure, examination, and local elite : the invention of the T'ung-ch'eng School in Ch'ing China / Kai-wing Chow -- Learning mathematical sciences during the early and mid-Ch'ing / Catherine Jami -- Tai Chen and learning in the Confucian tradition / Cynthia J. Brokaw -- Legal education in Ch'ing China / Wejen Chang -- Manchu education / Pamela Kyle Crossley -- Elementary education in the Lower Yangtze Region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries / Angela Ki Che Leung -- Education and empire in southwest China : Ch'en Hung-mou in Yunnan, 1733-38 / William T. Rose -- The divorce between the political center and educational creativity in late imperial China / Alexander Woodside -- Lung-men Academy in Shanghai and the expansion of Kiangsu's educated elite, 1865-1911 / Barry Keenan -- Afterword : the expansion of education in Ch'ing China / Alexander Woodside and Benjamin A. Elman.

With unprecedented breadth, this volume integrates the history of late imperial China with the history of education over three centuries of Chinese social, political, and intellectual life. The essays probe beneath the educational ideals enunciated by Neo-Confucian philosophers to elucidate actual educational practice in China from the late Ming dynasty to the late Ch'ing. Among the questions addressed: How was education affected by gender and kinship relations?

What were the content and perceived function of elementary education? How did civil service examinations represent elite educational ideals? How did the doubling in size of the late empire under Manchu rule influence the extension of education and schooling in a multiethnic political culture? The authors also examine the intellectual battles over the very meaning of "school" in China before the twentieth century.

. A collaboration between social and intellectual historians, this volume is the most comprehensive work in English on education in China from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.