How Can Teacherhood Achieve Self-Determination? The Historical Background and A Recent Change in Light of the Five-Tier Grading System of the Nanyang Public School Normal College

Abstract

The introduction of a teacher education system based on cultural subjectivity is among the best proposals that have been made under the new era for the development of high-quality education in China. The author is studying the Five-Tier Grading System as a specific training and testing program of the Nanyang Public School Normal College, which was the forerunner of the contemporary government-run normal education in China, and uses the historical institutionalism and textual analysis methodological approaches to deeply examine what it can be considered as an institution of a morally and academically advanced training system, a knowledge and practice incorporated system and a unified evaluation system and how it is rooted in the Confucian culture. The results indicate that the Five-Tier Grading System is not merely a knowledge evaluation system but a complete education system that involves moral growth, acquisition of knowledge, practical skills, and social accountability, hence a holistic approach in building a teacher personality. The present work critically builds upon the historical knowledge to tackle the current challenges and tries to create a model of training objectives of normal students, which will be called Three-Dimension and Five-Phase, to assist in resolving the current challenge in normal education, including a lack of cultural subjectivity and training goal uniformity. The framework is stated clearly in terms of progressive developmental indicators founded upon three critical dimensions of the physical body of a teacher, knowledge of a teacher, and the manners of the teacher to form the ideological basis to create localized discourse systems of teacher education and find out the progress of teacher education with Chinese characteristics creatively integrating the spirit of the traditional education with the current needs of the education.