For the Tang Dynasty, the peasant issue was the most important issue from beginning to end.
Even though Li Xuan has tried his best to promote the development of industry and commerce, relatively speaking, Li Xuan is actually more concerned about farmers' issues.
This can be seen from the financial investment of both. On the surface, the Tang Dynasty gave many tax benefits to industry and commerce, and there were countless various supports. However, in fact, the financial investment of the Tang Dynasty in industry and commerce was far higher.
There is not so much investment in agriculture.
Various water conservancy facilities, resettlement and reclamation, etc., all support agriculture, and this intensity is very strong.
Not to mention anything else, the financial budget support for domestic resettlement and reclamation is as high as tens of millions of taels!!
One million taels is enough to prove the importance that the Tang Dynasty attached to agriculture.
Therefore, any issues related to agriculture and farmers were extremely important issues in the Tang Dynasty!
The same is true for the reform of official land and land rent!
On the surface, this is just a change in the way of collecting land rent, but don’t underestimate that this is just an issue of land rent for official land. You must know that in the Tang Dynasty, the number of official land is very large, and the government currently occupies
The amount of cultivated land accounted for 30% of all cultivated land under the control of the Tang Dynasty. Any changes in official land will directly affect the lives of tens of millions of people who rent official land, and the introduction will also affect
Everyone in the country.
The impact of this matter was too great, and Li Xuan remained very cautious about it.
Therefore, regarding the issue of government land rent reform raised by the Ministry of Agriculture this time, he directly ignored it. He needed to return to Jinling City to hold a special discussion meeting on this matter.
The issue of official land reform has been temporarily put on hold, but more problems are still waiting for Li Xuan to deal with!
In mid-February, Shengjia and his party, who slowly returned to Jinling City along the Yangtze River, arrived in Anqing.
While staying there, Li Xuan inspected Anqing and summoned two senior officials from North Anhui Province and South Anhui Province to listen to their work reports!
At the meeting between the two imperial roads, Li Xuan focused on the agricultural production issues in these two areas, and also focused on the development of industry and commerce, and pointed out that local officials in the two roads should make good use of their own advantages and actively
To develop people's livelihood and make people's lives better.
Two days later, Shengjia left Anqing and continued his slow march eastward!
At this time, the Xuanping Seventh Year Examination had already been held in Jinling City. The scale of this examination was larger than before, with a total of 700 Jinshi and 600 doctoral candidates admitted.
A total of 1,300 scholars have successfully entered the officialdom. In the future, they will be enriched in central ministries or become a new generation of middle and low-level officials.
In addition, this time in the examination, the Imperial College was as strong as ever. This year, a total of more than 400 students from the College of Liberal Arts and the School of Science of the Imperial College participated in the examination, and more than 350 Imperial College students were admitted.
Man, the pass rate is quite scary!
In addition, several other institutions of higher learning in the higher education system also performed very well. Jinling University had more than 200 students participate in the joint examination, and 120 people took the mid-term examination.
The graduates of several normal schools such as Jinling Normal University, Guangzhou Normal University, and Songjiang Normal University also performed well, and the pass rate was maintained at around 20%. Originally, graduates of these normal schools would graduate after one year of study.
, you need to work as a teacher for several years.
However, in the early stage, in order to attract talents to sign up, improve the attractiveness of normal schools, and increase the number of teachers as soon as possible, the conditions previously established were relatively loose, and students could choose independently.
For example, tuition-free students need to work as teachers for at least five years after graduation. After working as teachers for five years, they will be eligible to directly apply for the National Examination. If they are not confident about passing the National Examination, they can also apply for the Imperial College or Jinling University, or
Directly based on the identity of the candidate, you can take the official examination held by each province. After passing it, you can serve in local government agencies at the provincial level or below.
At the same time, there are also fee-paying students. After graduation, they are not required to work as teachers, but they are still eligible to apply for the National Examination, Imperial College, and Jinling University.
And this spring examination in the seventh year of Xuanping was the first time that fee-paying students from these normal schools participated in the examination!
Anyway, the time for the general examination is one month earlier than the admission time for the Imperial College and Jinling University!
If you fail, then apply to these two universities again, and then take the entrance exam after studying for a few years.
Nowadays, the outstanding achievements of these normal schools have attracted the attention of scholars all over the world!
And why do scholars focus on studying? Isn’t it just to become an official?
Everyone knew that Guozijian University and Jinling University were awesome, but what is very frustrating is that when recruiting students, these two universities only recruit people with academic merit or preparatory school graduates, or simply
He is a graduate of a normal school. Anyone else who wants to apply for the exam must still have this qualification.
But now, they see another opportunity, which is to apply for the Normal University!
For a time, normal schools all over the country also ushered in a wave of applications!
Poor children often choose to attend school for free and then work as teachers for three years, while those from wealthy families can directly choose to attend school at their own expense, but after all, they are a minority.
Why, because tuition is expensive!
The cost of education in the Tang Dynasty was actually not low, and there was basically no term for free education. At least there were very few scholarship systems or commissioned training systems.
Tuition-free normal school students are actually a kind of authorized trainees!
Because the education system of the Tang Dynasty was essentially an elite education, even the primary schools in each county were not actually responsible for the most basic enlightenment education, and not all school-age children could enter the school.
If you want to go to school, you have to pass the exam and pay tuition!
Of course, poor children with excellent academic performance will always receive preferential treatment. Scholarships are prepared for poor children with excellent academic performance, and scholarships are generally set relatively high. The Ministry of Rites clearly stipulates that each school must establish a scholarship system based on its own situation.
In principle, the number of students who enroll for free must not be less than 5%!
At Jinling Preparatory School, they have a very famous two-three-five system, that is, 20% of the students at Jinling Preparatory School are admitted for free, 30% of the students are admitted for half-fee, and 100% are admitted for half-fee.
Fifty out of 10 students enroll at full tuition.
But where did the scholarship come from? Local fiscal expenditure? Central fiscal expenditure? Don't talk nonsense. Educational funding has always been ignored in the Tang Dynasty.
The finance department doesn’t provide any money, and the school doesn’t have any money, so what should we do?
Naturally, let the rich students pay for it!
The principle is very simple. If it takes one hundred taels to train ten students, then let three of the students contribute more than seven taels of silver, and five students should contribute more than fifteen taels. After collecting the one hundred taels, the remaining two
A student can get it for free!
In other words, the current tuition fee system of the Tang Dynasty allows some self-financed students from wealthy families to bear the educational expenses of poor children!
This also leads to the fact that tuition fees for self-financed students are relatively expensive!
If you want not to pay tuition, you can. If you study hard and become one of the 20%, then you can do it for free.
Everything is based on results, which is quite fair!
Then maybe someone said that the environment for rich people is better, students are more likely to get good grades, and they will occupy 20% of the scholarships. So what should the poor children do? The conditions for awarding scholarships should be restricted, etc.
, for example, you have to be poor to a certain extent.
But if someone studies hard and gets good grades, he can’t get a scholarship just because his family has money? That’s nonsense!
Since poor children are poor and have a poor learning environment, they should study harder than them. Is it possible that they still want pie in the sky?
The 20% scholarship quota only gives poor children an opportunity to attend school for free. Whether they can seize it or not depends on them.
Otherwise, it would be fair enough to simply pay tuition fees across the board, but in this case, all poor children will not be able to afford to go to school regardless of whether they work hard or not!
The current education system of Datang is not for everyone. It does not matter whether you have money or not, as long as you are mediocre. Datang education is prepared for the real elite!
The reason for this is very simple. The Tang Dynasty needed money everywhere and was financially poor!
It is nonsense to try to provide universal education in a feudal dynasty that still relies on agricultural economy as its core pillar. The best thing to do is wait until the economy develops in the future, slowly lower the tuition fees for basic education, and provide more
of government schools.
As for free education, let’s wait a few hundred years!
It's just that in this way, the education expenses in the entire Tang Dynasty were at two extremes. On the one hand, if you study well, you don't need to pay for it. On the other hand, if your academic performance is slightly poor, you will need expensive tuition.
If it is at one's own expense, if it is a primary school, an ordinary peasant family can afford one person's education expenses just by gritting their teeth.
As for middle school, even small landowners and small businessman families will find it very difficult, because the annual tuition for middle-aged students reaches more than ten taels of silver.
The annual tuition for higher-level preparatory courses reaches dozens of taels of silver. For example, the annual tuition of Jinling Preparatory School is forty-five taels of silver, while the annual salary of an ordinary ninth-grade clerk or patrol officer is only
That’s about it.
As for universities, the Imperial College or Jinling are more expensive, with tuition fees of hundreds of taels per year.
This money is nothing to the gentry and businessmen, but to ordinary people, it is very expensive.
However, this is only limited to self-pay!
In fact, students who enroll for free currently account for more than 15%, and more than 20% and 30% of students enroll at half-fee.
The normal school currently run by the Tang Dynasty is a special case because as long as you sign a contract to be a teacher before enrolling, you can enroll for free, thus attracting a large number of students to apply.
Of course, you can pay for it yourself if you have the money, but the tuition fee is basically the same as attending Imperial College, and you’ll get more than a hundred taels of silver per year!
After all, when Datang established normal schools, it was not to train officials, but to train teachers. Since you want to occupy educational resources and then become an official instead of being a teacher, you will naturally have to pay a price.
And with enough money, the academic performance is acceptable, and the normal school will accept everyone who comes!
Because without these self-funded students, their normal schools would not be able to open!