The Pros And Cons Of The Imperial Selection System

Imperial selection system is a thoughtfully designed system, facilitating to choose the best candidates for civil service officials’ positions. Being selected for the administrative post meant a wealthy life, public recognition and respect for the person, that’s why it has stimulated people to become organized, disciplined, very dedicated, hard-working and competition-resistant. The system was very relevant for the ancient China, allowing to create a good network of well-educated, talented and loyal people around the emperor. It was a perfect way to overcome the lack of knowledge, opinions and broad views among the officials that were previously selected by promotion or appointment. China was the first nation that started to value talent and

Let’s take a look at the system’s fairness, reliability, influence, content coverage, as well as its limitations, which has resulted in the termination of the system.

One of the core features of the Imperial selection system was its fairness and equality. All people disregarding their status, income, age had a chance to take tests, challenging their skills and knowledge to achieve a better life. Even though from the modern perspective there was discrimination in the system, e.g. exclusion of women from taking the exam, and some other minorities, the issue of discrimination had to be addressed within the contextual framework of society’s historical development as a whole. Women were discriminated not by the

Selection based only on education was used as a tool to create a government consisting of meritocracy, but from the modern perspective sole solid and far reaching knowledge in particular subjects (mainly classic literature) isn’t enough for becoming a good government executive. Obsession with getting a high score on the test could possible stimulate people to memorize and study only for the test’s sake, preventing thoroughly content understanding and analyzing, limiting the practical use of knowledge. The system has tested the ability to memorize and replicate, it demonstrated people’s diligence, hard-working, attention to details but didn’t inspire critical thinking. It didn’t encourage potential candidates to think about current people’s and country’s issues in general and restrained actual intellectual and talent development. These limitation and narrow content focus as well as bureaucratization of the Imperial selection system have led to its termination. However, long experience from the system was greatly assessed and learnt by the modern society. System’s disadvantages, for example the lack of unified test preparation mechanism for all candidates were taken into account and have found its reflection not only in the modernization and creation of the new patterns for the actual selection systems but also in the establishment of unified Chinese national education