Gu Mingyuan - Comparative Educator and Modernization Theorist

Abstract

Gu Mingyuan was born in 1929 in the small town of Jiangyin, about halfway between Shanghai and Nanjiing in southern Jiangsu province. His father was a secondary school teacher and his grandfather was a shop assistant in a tea store. The rest of the family lived by subsistence farming, as they did not own any land. However, the location of Jiangyin in proximity to these major cities meant that it benefited from a highly developed progressive education movement in the early 20th century, as well as regional traditions of scholarship going back many centuries. Thus Gu was able to benefit from the excellent primary and secondary education, which his family arranged for him in spite of their modest means. This laid a foundation for him to become one of China’s outstanding educators and leading specialists in comparative education in the period after Deng Xiaoping set China on a course of education for modernization in the late 1970s.