Tao Xingzhi

Tao Xingzhi (陶行知, T'ao Hsing-chih; 1891-1946), a prominent educator, studied at Columbia School of Education and returned to China to champion progressive education, such as kindergartens. His career in China as a liberal educator was not derivative of John Dewey, as some have alleged, but creative and adaptive. He returned to China at a time when the American influence was zesty and self-confident, and his very name at that time ("zhixing") meant “knowledge-action,” reflecting the catch-phrase of Wang Yangming's philosophy, and implying directly that once knowledge had been obtained, then action would be easy.

Returning from study in the United States at University of Illinois and Columbia University in 1917, he turned to "life education." He then also returned to his humble roots. “Originally,” he wrote to his beloved younger sister, “I was a common Chinese, but gradually through ten years of life as a student, I developed a foreign, aristocratic tendency.” Shanghai, the capital and center of modern/foreign China, he now found “vulgar, rushed, and crowded.” Then “suddenly, like the Yellow River breaking its dikes..., I woke up ["juewu" , the Buddhist term for satori] to the fact that I was being robbed of my Chineseness.” He took to wearing a traditional scholar's gown, and turned to mass education. He then reversed his name to the more well-known form, "xingzhi", that is, “action-knowledge,” directly implying that (Chinese) action/praxis will produce (Chinese) knowledge. He denounced “false intelligentsia” ("wei zhishi jieji") for drawing on second hand, foreign experience of which they had no authentic knowledge.

In August of 1923, Tao and Y.C. James Yen organized a National Association of Mass Education Movements (MEM). At the height of its literacy campaign in the 1920s, Yen estimated that the MEM had five million students and more than 100,000 volunteer teachers. Tao went on to become the nation's leading promoter of rural teacher's education. At his village-based normal school at Xiaozhuang outside Nanjing, he produced a number of innovative techniques such as the "little teacher", who taught his or her family what had just been learned in school, and the "each one teach one" technique of organized teaching networks. The school was closed in 1930, probably for political reasons. [Hubert Brown, “American Progressivism in China: The Case of Tao Xingzhi,” in Hayhoe and Bastid, editors, China’s Education and the Industrialized World, pp. 120-138, quotes at pp. 126.]

In the 1930s Tao wrote children's literature, started the Life Education Association, and started a Work Study Movement. He was in the United States when war with Japan broke out in 1937, but returned to China, where he was made a member of the People's Political Council. In 1939, he moved to Beipei, just outside Chongqing, to found the Yucai Middle School (School for Nourishing Talent). Tao received monthly stipends from Feng Yuxiang and Zhang Zhizong, both fellow Anhui natives. A leader of one of the two CCP cells at Tao’s school later recalled that Tao and his patron, Feng gave help to party workers when they were hunted by the secret police, and that Tao professed interest in Mao Zedong's “On New Democracy.” [Wei Dongming, “Weidadi Renmin jiaoyujia dazong shijen” (A great people’s educator, poet of the masses), in Tao Xingzhi jinian wenji (Chengdu: Sichuan Peoples Publishing House, 1982), pp. 101-103]

In 1946, after the Yucai School was harassed by the political police, he moved back to Shanghai. Fearing that he would meet the same fate as other intellectuals assassinated by right wing Nationalists, he worked frantically, leading to exhaustion and death. Zhou Enlai rushed to his home and called him a “non-Party Bolshevik.”

References

Further Reading

* "T'ao Hsing-chih," in Howard Boorman, ed., "Biographical Dictionary of Republican China" (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970) III.243-248.
* Stacey Bieler, "Patriots" or "Traitors"? A History of American-Educated Chinese Students" (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004).
* Yusheng Yao, "Rediscovering Tao Xingzhi as an Educational and Social Revolutionary," "Twentieth Century China" 27.2 (April 2002): 79-120.
* Yusheng Yao, "The Making of a National Hero: Tao Xingzhi's Legacies in the People's Republic of China," "Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies" 24.2 (July-September 2002): 251-281.

Persondata
NAME=Tao Xingzhi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Chinese educator
DATE OF BIRTH=1891
PLACE OF BIRTH=China
DATE OF DEATH=1946
PLACE OF DEATH=Shanghai, China