Confucius regarded three things that is people, wealth and education as the three essentials of any country. He is believed to be greatest advocate of popular education and the first person in Chinese history to give his almost entire life to teaching (Zhang 1999). He worked to establish private education and make education accessible to all. He believed that the purpose of education was to provide with the ability to reason, to develop right thoughts, right feelings and right actions and that a good education system should provide young people with enough chance for developing the right concepts and capacity for leading a happy life and for seeing service to other people as their duty. He also believed that if people do not have knowledge they could not cooperate in an effective way and the direction of man’s moral growth depends very much on his education and merit should be the social way in awarding political and economic privileges. Respect for knowledge and the lifelong pursuit of learning was a fundamental human obligation in his tradition.
According to Mackerras (2008), the dominant ideology of traditional China was Confucianism which was secular, hierarchical, authoritarian and family centred. The imperial family was at the top and an amazing small number of officials just below who were largely selected and maintained in office after going through a comprehensive, complex and stereotyped examination system.
2. Civil Service Examinations
The Civil service examination was an examination system in imperial to select the best administrative officials for the state's bureaucracy. The system of using examinations system played a key role in the emergence of the scholar-officials in early Chinese system, which came to dominate society. The system continued to be used in China as years went by with some modifications.
2.1. The Nature of the Examinations
The examinations were held at three levels that is district, provincial and at metropolitan. At district level exams were conducted by district magistrates for candidates of his local area where 8 legged essays on subjects taken from the Confucian four books- the Analects, the Book of the Mean, the Book of Menicus and the Great Learning. One would be asked to write a short poem of six couplets with five characters to the line. Many students were said to be dismissed in this first district session due to wrong use of words and violation of rules of rhyme. The successful candidates would proceed to the provincial level where a similar test to the previous one at district level would be administered to make sure that no one had proceeded by luck. Successful candidates would be undergo yuan exam given by the provincial education commissioner. At this stage extreme care in hall of exam was taken to avoid corruption and favouratism. Successful candidates would be given degrees in the emperor’s name and a governor general would give a banquet in honour of new degree holders, and later sent home, only to return in the third month of the following year for metropolitan exams in Peking. A further scrutiny of exam papers was done by Board of Rites in Peking and afterwards, the papers were kept safe. Those who failed would be sent to their homes as community leaders to await the next exams. The metropolitan exams was in three sessions:- first session, candidates wrote four essays , of which three would be expository and one critical on historical subjects. Hutchings Graham, A Guide to A Century of Change, Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001.
2. Hsu Immanuel C. Y, The Rise of Modern China, 6th Edition, University of California, Barbara Santa, New York Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000
3. Lary Diana, China’s Republic, University of British Columbia, Cambridge University Press, 2007
4. Mackerras Colin, China in Transformation 1900-1949, 2nd Edition, Pearson Education Limited, 2008.