"At the genesis of the Republic of China in 1912, many political leaders, educators, and social reformers argued that republican education should transform China’s people into dynamic modern citizens—social and political agents whose public actions would rescue the national community. Over subsequent decades, however, they came to argue fiercely over the contents of citizenship and how it should be taught. Moreover, many of their carefully crafted policies and programs came to be transformed by textbook authors, teachers, administrators, and students. Furthermore, the idea of citizenship, once introduced, raised many troubling questions. Who belonged to the national community in China, and how was the nation constituted? What were the best modes of political action? How should modern people take responsibility for “public matters”? What morality was proper for the modern public? This book reconstructs civic education and citizenship training in secondary schools in the lower Yangzi region during the Republican era. It also analyzes how students used the tools of civic education introduced in their schools to make themselves into young citizens and explores the complex social and political effects of educated youths’ civic action."

Here is a book that challenges the very basis of the way psychologists have studied child development. According to Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the world's foremost developmental psychologists, laboratory studies of the child's behavior sacrifice too much in order to gain experimental control and analytic rigor. Laboratory observations, he argues, too often lead to "the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time." To understand the way children actually develop, Bronfenbrenner believes that it will be necessary to observe their behavior in natural settings, while they are interacting with familiar adults over prolonged periods of time. This book offers an important blueprint for constructing such a new and ecologically valid psychology of development. The blueprint includes a complete conceptual framework for analysing the layers of the environment that have a formative influence on the child. This framework is applied to a variety of settings in which children commonly develop, ranging from the pediatric ward to daycare, school, and various family configurations. The result is a rich set of hypotheses about the developmental consequences of various types of environments. Where current research bears on these hypotheses, Bronfenbrenner marshals the data to show how an ecological theory can be tested. Where no relevant data exist, he suggests new and interesting ecological experiments that might be undertaken to resolve current unknowns. Bronfenbrenner's groundbreaking program for reform in developmental psychology is certain to be controversial. His argument flies in the face of standard psychological procedures and challenges psychology to become more relevant to the ways in which children actually develop. It is a challenge psychology can ill-afford to ignore.

"Forty lessons designed to introduce beginning students to the basic patterns and structures of Classical Chinese are taken from a number of pre-Han and Han texts selected to give students a grounding in exemplary Classical Chinese style. Two additional lessons use texts from later periods to help students appreciate the changes in written Chinese over the centuries. Each lesson consists of a text, a vocabulary list featuring discussions of meaning and usage, explanations of grammar, and explications of difficult passages. The standard modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean pronunciations are indicated for each character, making this a learning tool for native speakers of those languages as well. Appendices give suggestions for further readings, review common and significant words, explain the radical system, and provide Japanese kanbun readings for all the selections. Glossaries of all vocabulary items and pronunciation indexes for modern Chinese and Korean are also included."

"Soon after overthrowing the Tokugawa government in 1868, the new Meiji leaders devised ambitious plans to build a modern nation-state. Among the earliest and most radical of the Meiji reforms was a plan for a centralized, compulsory educational system modeled after those in Europe and America. Meiji leaders hoped that schools would curb mounting social disorder and mobilize the Japanese people against the threat of Western imperialism. The sweeping tone of this revolutionary plan obscured the fact that the Japanese were already quite literate and had clear ideas about what a school should be. In the century preceding the Meiji restoration, commoners throughout Japan had established 50,000 schools with almost no guidance or support from the government. Consequently, the Ministry of Education’s new code of 1872 met with resistance, as local officials, teachers, and citizens sought compromises and pursued alternative educational visions. Their efforts ultimately led to the growth and consolidation of a new educational system, one with the imprint of local demands and expectations. This book traces the unfolding of this process in Nagano prefecture and explores how local people negotiated the formation of the new order in their own communities. "

Where does Neo-Confucianismâe"a movement that from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries profoundly influenced the way people understood the world and responded to itâe"fit into our story of Chinaâe(tm)s history? This interpretive, at times polemical, inquiry into the Neo-Confucian engagement with the literati as the social and political elite, local society, and the imperial state during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties is also a reflection on the role of the middle period in Chinaâe(tm)s history. The book argues that as Neo-Confucians put their philosophy of learning into practice in local society, they justified a new social ideal in which society at the local level was led by the literati with state recognition and support. The later imperial order, in which the state accepted local elite leadership as necessary to its own existence, survived even after Neo-Confucianism lost its hold on the center of intellectual culture in the seventeenth century but continued as the foundation of local education. It is the contention of this book that Neo-Confucianism made that order possible.

"The short-lived Kenmu regime (1333–1336) of Japanese Emperor Go-Daigo is often seen as an inevitably doomed, revanchist attempt to shore up the old aristocratic order. But far from resisting change, Andrew Edmund Goble here forcefully argues, the flamboyant Go-Daigo and his iconoclastic associates were among the competitors seeking to overcome the old order and renegotiate its structure and ethos. Their ultimate defeat did not automatically spell failure; rather, the revolutionary nature of their enterprise decisively moved Japan into its medieval age. By birth, education, and circumstances, Go-Daigo should have been a weak, fatalistic bit player. Instead this student of Chinese political theory was a bold actor with an unprecedented knowledge of the various regions of Japan, who forced situations to his own benefit and led a rebellion that overthrew the Kamakura bakufu. Kenmu: Go-Daigo’s Revolution tells his extraordinary personal story vividly, reexamines original sources to discover the real nature of the Kenmu polity, and sets both within the broader backdrop of social, economic, and intellectual change at a dynamic moment in Japanese history."