Ni-Huanzhi

Ye Shengtao is an important writer in modern Chinese literary history. His keen interest and passion in education and literature make him an outstanding modern Chinese educator. He used varieties of literature and art forms such as stories, essays, fairy tales and poetries to build bridges connecting modern Chinese literature and Chinese modern education. Ye Shengtao used literature as the carrier to establish a modern aesthetic value system for the purpose of the Han native, and to set up his own unique paradigm of modern narrative in order to demonstrate unique artistic effect. Ye Shengtao combined vocational education with literature, despite a conflict in the two kinds of thinking - education emphasizes on an abstract thinking, highlighting the reason, while literary thinking lies upon imagination, highlighting the emotion. Yet this is precisely the author's uniqueness. Being a literature creator, Ye Sheng-tao chose education as his career yet observed unreasonable things in the field of education in an educational practitioner’s perspective and presented them to readers in the form of literature. He was very concerned about the living condition of the grass-root intellectual life, writing "Beauty, love, joy of life and happy" as well as good and the ugly with a hard-working and honest pen. His literary idea included honest, hard-writing, targeting his own familiar things and people as well as "Literature is education"; while his education reform ideas were comprised of developing good habits, child-based, cultivate robust citizens and other factors. Such ideas and concepts showed dual characteristics of the ideal and the pragmatic and destined to accompany the conflict between roles and concepts, the deviation of tradition and modernity as well as the complexity of ideas, contradictions, and a paradoxical implication showed in the inner tension. Ye Sheng-tao is an autonomous idealist between the education and literature. Searching for all the journals, papers and dissertation since 1979, although there are hundreds of results on the Ye Shengtao research, yet so far none of them are an overall assessment of him. These papers are mostly about his teaching of reading and writing, but few studies focus on how he linked literature to education in such a harmonious way as well as the evaluation of research on he is both a writer and an educator. Only a master's thesis dealt with this issue from an educational novel point of view. This paper wants to do such an inquiry that uncovers his status of being both a writer and an educator and clearly explains how he integrated the two in harmony, particularly with regard to evaluating the impact of education on literature based on an educational writer position. So far no one is interested in the issue; it has certain instructive meaning for the future development of literature. This is the focus and difficult point of the study as well as one of the innovation researches in this paper.