Abstract : After the first Opium War (1840), an unprecedented large change occurred in China. Since Tianjin became a treaty port, its urban economy developed rapidly and therefore its city status was strongly enhanced. Through a series of events, such as "the foreign affairs" carried out by Li Hongzhang, the new political reform initiated by Yan Fu, and "the New Deal" promoted by Yuan Shikai, the modernization of Tianjin was speeded up obviously. As a consequence of the social transformation, the educational information in Tianjin was also carried out accordingly: various new-style schools were established in Tianjin to replace the old ones and these schools also ranked highly among the schools all across China. Tianjin thus became the new education center in North China. For example, BeiyangUniversity, the first modern university in China, was born in Tianjin.

After the 1911 Revolution, the Republic of China was founded, which promoted the further development of the productive forces and also the new-style education in Tianjin. All the institutions, no matter they were public or private, including higher education, secondary normal education, and professional education, made significant progress during this special period.In particular, the Nankai school system, which was led by Zhang Boling, became a model for private education in China at that time.

Education is a propeller for social development. Within several decades, education in Tianjin amazingly finished the transition from the traditional system to the modern system, a process which usually took European countries several hundred years. Tianjin’s rapid transformation into the second biggest industrial and commercial city in China in the 1930s firmly related to the development of modern education in the city.

Keywords：social Transformation; Tianjin; modern education