Zhu Xi

• Birth: 1130
• Death: 1200
• Chinese: 朱熹 (Zhu Xi)

Zhu Xi was a prominent Neo-Confucian scholar of China's Song Dynasty. He is credited with spurring an explosion of private academies in the 12th-13th centuries, and is known for his emphasis on the importance of the inclusion of humanistic values and morality in formal study.

The Song Imperial Court had established hundreds of state-sponsored schools throughout the country, designed to train young men for the Chinese imperial examinations, through which candidates could earn positions in the imperial bureaucracy. Zhu Xi felt that these schools focused too heavily on rote memorization, stifled creative thinking, and lacked sufficient moral purpose and humanistic learning in their curricula. His arguments inspired the establishment of roughly 140 private academies in the 12th and 13th centuries, dedicated to a slightly more flexible mode of teaching the Confucian classics, in which philosophical discussion, creative thinking, and moral purpose occupied a larger space in the curriculum. Many families who agreed with Zhu Xi's ideals, or who believed these methods would lead to greater intellectual & career success, enrolled their children in these academies; many others enrolled their children in private academies chiefly because their children might find greater success in the examinations purely based on the prestige of the names of their teachers.

Zhu Xi's attitudes and approaches were rather non-orthodox in his time; however, in later centuries, the civil examination system shifted, and embraced his approaches and ideals as the new orthodox method for studying, and applying, the Confucian classics.

References

• Bonnie Smith et al. Crossroads and Cultures. Bedford/St. Martins (2012), 431.