Chapter 13 Lecture 3 Song Dynasty-2

2. The examination system of the Song Dynasty The examination system of the Song Dynasty was largely followed from that of the Tang Dynasty. Although there are differences in details, we can omit them.However, the influence of the imperial examinations in the Song Dynasty was different from that in the Tang Dynasty.The first is the power of family status in the Tang Dynasty. Examinations were introduced at that time, and many of the candidates who took the exam were still descendants of the family.The children of the family have been educated in the family and have already learned a lot of political anecdotes. Once they enter politics, they will be more capable.If the accumulation gradually reached the late Tang Dynasty, the school gradually deteriorated, and most of the candidates who took the exam were poor scholars who studied hard in poor windows.Apart from paying attention to the subjects for the exam, concentrating on anthology of poems and prose, or memorizing scriptures, the state has not given them so-called education.The lessons of family status are gone, and the political tradition is even more ignorant.So Jinshi is frivolous, which became a buzzword in the late Tang Dynasty.Followed by the Song Dynasty, except for a few families of the Lu family and the Han family, the tradition of family status disappeared.Rural children, white house scholars, and remote kaotong, who suddenly become Chinese and enter official careers, are inevitably unfamiliar with practical politics. As for private education, there is nothing to talk about.

Secondly, in the examinations of the Tang Dynasty, there was a system of public papers and lists.The so-called public papers are for examinees to send their daily poetry and prose scores to the central government and send them to the advanced bureaucrats in the government who are capable of reading and learning.This generation is advanced, after reading the candidates' daily works, they first brag about their grades. Before the exam, many well-known people have already obtained an objective status.The general list is to publish the list after the exam, that is, to select famous people according to the public opinion of the society and the government's predecessors, but not just based on the length of the exam.Even the chief examiner is humble, because he doesn't understand the academic public evaluation in the examination room this time, so he doesn't decide the ranking by himself, but Qian Ren decides the ranking on his behalf, and Qian and the examinee decide on his behalf, and the examinee decides himself as the number one. .But such things turned out to be good news at the time, and they were not considered fraud.Originally, the examination was to select talents for the country. I understand the main spirit and original meaning of this system, so why worry about the details one by one.But some people want to cheat by taking advantage of the leniency of the system, so the government can't help but tighten the system to prevent cheating.This is true of all systems.However, the system has gradually become stricter, and sometimes it loses its original meaning, and only focuses on preventing fraud.The examination system of the Song Dynasty was far stricter than that of the Tang Dynasty. At that time, there was a system of vague names, and the real test scores were relied on.In fact, the test results are only a day's length, so the chief examiner intends to admit the student he is most proud of on weekdays, but because of the vague name, he can't find the test paper of this person, and this person finally fails.If this is the case, the examination control will be strict, and sometimes the real talent will not be obtained.

In the Tang Dynasty, the examination was in the Ministry of Rites, and the distribution and appointment were in the Ministry of Officials.The Ministry of Rites and the Ministry of Rites may not be appointed immediately, so they are still often appointed by the heads of the yamen to work as bureaucrats in the shogunate, but they have practiced political affairs first.In the Song Dynasty, due to the long-term darkness of the Five Dynasties, people did not like learning. The imperial court deliberately rewarded literature and attached importance to the imperial examinations.These are the shortcomings of the Song Dynasty examination system.In short, the examination system became more important and stricter in the Song Dynasty, but it was not more effective.However, due to the government's promotion over the years, the social and academic atmosphere has been revived.So many people came out to reform the system.The first is to replace examinations with school education, which is the most important thing.Exams can only select talents, but fail to cultivate talents.There was Taixue in the Han Dynasty, and family status in the Tang Dynasty. These are all for cultivating talents.The society cultivates talents, and the government has choices in examinations.People in Song Dynasty wanted to actively develop education, which is not bad.But this is not to be expected.The second is to change the content of the examination, instead of examining poetry and prose, test the meaning of scriptures.The intention of this layer is also true.Everyone learns poetry and fu, and it is not a proper way to use this standard to find talents for the government.However, after the reform, the gains did not compensate for the losses, and the study of scriptures and meanings was not as good as the study of poetry and fu.Wang Jinggong sighed because of this, saying that he wanted to change a scholar into a scholar, but unexpectedly changed a scholar into a scholar.The reasons for the pros and cons of this are not going to be detailed at the moment.From what has been said above, it can be seen that each system is also subject to the cooperation of other circumstances.If other circumstances change, the efficacy and performance of this system will also change accordingly.But in any case, the poetry examination system is a relatively important system in China's political system, and it has lasted for more than a thousand years from Tang to Qing.There were reforms and evolutions in the middle, and it was by no means accidental that it accumulated the wisdom of countless people and gradually developed in the course of history.Until the late Qing Dynasty, Westerners still knew how to use this system to bridge the bias of their political party elections, but we have given up on the previous examination system with a history of more than a thousand years, and no longer pay attention to it. There is no longer any room for appeasement.That was a strange thing.Fortunately, Mr. Sun Yat-sen proposed this system again and listed it as one of the five rights. It is really like a treasure throwing dirt and picking it up again.However, we still pay little attention to the long-term evolution of this system over the past thousand years.It seems that the examination system in Chinese history is still just a policy of obscuring the people under our unique dark autocratic politics.It is a different matter to implement the examination system today, as if it does not want to have anything to do with the examination system under the historical tradition.This is really our prejudice, not the truth.It's a pity that we can't talk about the system in detail in this lecture.