Textbook exhibition traces China's educational evolution

Textbooks serve as living fossils recording China's educational evolution, and a special exhibition hosted by Beijing Normal University Library brings these time-honored teaching materials to light, offering insights into how education has shaped generations of Chinese people, according to librarians at Beijing Normal University.

That idea is at the heart of a basic education textbook exhibition at the Beijing Normal University Library, which began collecting textbooks in the 1930s. The library now holds more than 80,000 titles and 240,000 volumes of textbooks at various levels and types.

Wang Xianfang, the library's director, said textbooks are the foundation and an important carrier of education. "They reflect the interaction between the state and the people," Wang said. The state hopes to shape a certain kind of person, and through textbooks that person is shaped, he said, adding that textbooks are "fossils" in the history of education.

For BNU, a pioneer of modern teacher education in China, preserving and studying textbooks is part of its mission. "Teacher education is our foundation. Studying the history of teacher education and textbooks, and gaining a deeper understanding of educational history, is the mission and responsibility of BNU people," Wang said.

The library has followed a principle of "collecting all that should be collected", especially textbooks dating back to the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and China's republican era (1912-49). Such textbooks are scarce, and few teacher-training universities have comparable holdings, he said.

In 2022, the library launched an online database of textbooks from the period based on its own collection and contributions from other institutions, according to Hu Shenqiu, an associate research librarian at the library.

It covers six categories, including traditional elementary education, primary school, middle school and higher education, teacher training, vocational schools and others. Access is currently limited to campus IP addresses, but usage has been high, she said.