Virtuous Children and Where to Find Them: Education and Representations of Young People in Chinese Sources Between Tradition and Modernity
3: Developing Creative Skills Through Interactive Content in Chinese Children's Magazines Between the 19th and 20th Centuries
Sunday, March 27, 2022
10:45am – 12:15pm EST
Location: Conv. Center, Room 322A
University of Palermo, Italy
The 1875 Xiaohai yuebao 小孩月報 (Children’s Monthly) was the first periodical to exclusively address young readers. Thereafter, a wide range of magazines which provided content for a young audience flourished all over China, produced both by locals and foreigners. These publications followed the footsteps of the early pictorials, whose aim was to make knowledge available to the least educated, including villagers and women, but also youngsters.
The idea that figurative and entertaining content could support written text in engaging all kinds of readers and conveying useful knowledge was also expressed in the 1895 Shenbao editorial Lun huabao keyi qimeng 論晝報可以啟蒙 (On the Educational Role of Pictorials). Moreover, Liang Qichao’s 1897 essay Lun youxue 論幼學 (On Children’s Education) emphasized how employing methods of education that stimulated children’s creativity was important in the development of a modern nation, as was the case in Western countries. Liang proposed that instead of memorizing the Classics and learning how to write eight-legged essays, the knowledge useful for becoming an active citizen had to be made accessible by means of entertaining and motivational learning activities, including songs and games.
By providing a panoramic view of the features and social purposes of the main children magazines that took up the initiative of Xiaohai yuebao, this paper will analyze the earliest forms of non-textual content that offered young readers practical and ludic activities, conceived of as a way to develop their creativity, intuition and everyday skills.