Modern Science Education in China

Abstract

In the late Qing Dynasty, missionaries and church schools played a role in spreading the fundamental scientific knowledge. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Qing government issued its first science education system. Subsequently, the system changed several times, abolishing the thousand-year-old imperial examination. After the establishment of the national government, the scientific education system became increasingly mature and school education developed rapidly. In the early days of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the science education took that of the Soviet Union as a reference to strengthen the engineering education, which was then stagnated and regressed for over one decade. Then under the thought that “science and technology are the first productive forces,” the scale of science education developed unprecedentedly since the reform and opening-up of China.