Book Review

Asia

One of the most remarkable features of late Imperial China was the leading sociopolitical role played by scholars and literary men, who were selected to serve as government officials through an elaborate system of written examinations. Educational procedures, obviously, were fundamental to the grooming of this most unusual premodern elite, and by the end of the Sung dynasty (960–1279), some 600 government schools and over 400 so-called academies (shu-yüan) are known to have been in existence. Schools, of course, were hardly unique to China—this book opens with some engaging comparisons to medieval European universities and Islamic colleges of law—but literacy and mastery of key texts held a special importance in traditional Chinese civilization. Linda A. Walton's new book examines in detail one particular kind of Sung dynasty educational institution: the academy.

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The tag "private" is often added to these academies in order to distinguish them from government schools. Indeed, conventional wisdom sees them emerging, originally, in opposition to official schools, with their career-oriented, examination-driven curricula, almost as a "form of resistance." Another interpretation of the academy movement in the Sung dynasty sees them as a forum for "True Way" Learning (Tao-hsüeh or Daoxue), in the tradition of Chu Hsi (Zhu Xi, 1130–1200). Chu Hsi's restoration of the White Deer Grotto academy in 1179 became an "acknowledged model" for a movement that first gained momentum in the depths of a purge. As True Way Learning climbed from "proscribed heterodoxy in 1195 to state orthodoxy by imperial proclamation in 1241," and from "being a challenge to prevailing dogma, to being a dogma itself," the academies that were associated with it prospered (pp. 5–6, 8, 32, 40).

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