4. The shaping and psychological influence of education on social values during the Ming and Qing dynasties

Abstract Background During the Ming and Qing dynasties, as a mature period of traditional Chinese society, the education system dominated by the imperial examination system deeply penetrated the social fabric. Existing research mostly focuses on explicit issues such as the evolution of the education system and cheating in the imperial examination system, with insufficient empirical research on its value shaping and psychological impact, and a lack of quantitative support. The study focuses on the Ming and Qing imperial examination archives, local chronicles, and literati diaries as core historical materials, combined with quantitative statistics and text analysis methods, to explore the mechanism of the impact of educational content and form on social core values and group psychology, aiming to provide a new perspective for exploring the modern value of traditional education. Methods The study selected local chronicles from 286 counties in 13 provinces during the Ming and Qing dynasties, 432 imperial examination answer sheets, 156 literary diaries, and 307 family education records as research samples, including different educational levels and regions. Using content analysis method to encode core textbooks and answer texts such as "Annotations to the Four Books, Chapters and Sentences," and extract values keywords; Use historical demographic methods to analyze the correlation data between sample education level, occupation, and social behavior. The study first uses bibliometric methods to screen representative historical materials, removing non first-hand materials with a credibility of less than 85%; Then use Nvivo software to encode the values dimension of the text; Finally, correlation analysis was conducted using SPSS to explore the correlation between education years, scores of various values, and psychological representations. Results Data shows that among those who receive systematic Confucian education, 83% of respondents list "loyalty to the monarch and filial piety" as their core values, which is much higher than the 21% of those who have not received formal education; There is a significant positive correlation (r = 0.76, p