Chapter III

THE NEW EDUCATION REFORM MOVEMENT: ITS ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT TO 1922

When John Dewey left China in July 1921, Hu Shih published a short account of his two-year trip, summarizing the major ideas Dewey expressed in China. In the history of China's contact with the West, no Western scholar had enjoyed such a large influence as Dewey, Hu wrote, and he added that in the coming decades it would "be impossible for another Western scholar to have an influ• ence larger than Professor Dewey's." 1 To support so bold a prophecy Hu Shih pointed out that education was the field in which, during the years ahead, the effect of Dewey's visit would continue to be multiplied. When Hu Shih and Chiang Meng-lin first thought of arranging a visiting professorship for John Dewey they knew he would advo• cate the experimental method and the scientific spirit. They also had a more specific reform aim in mind. They hoped that his fresh educational philosophy would, as they put it, "awaken our people, so everyone would become engaged in fundamental educa• tional reforms." 2 Over the next two years most of Dewey's lecture topics were, in fact, on education. Although the bankrupt condi• tion of education under warlordism in 1921 prevented immediate results, Hu pointed out in his farewell article that the seeds Dewey had disseminated in those two years would germinate in time:

In the future, as "experimental schools" gradually arise, Dewey's educational theory will have the opportunity for experimenta• tion; and that will be when Dewey's philosophy blooms and bears fruit! At the present time Dewey is just a famous name, but ten or twenty years from now Dewey's name will be attached to innumerable Dewey-style "experimental schools," directly or indirectly influencing education in all China. Will not that kind of influence be one hundred thousand times larger than it is now? 3

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These hopes went unrealized. Instead, Deweyan educational reforms were frustrated by dilemmas inherent in the reform strategy of his followers. The reformers who promoted Dewey believed in the Republic of 1912, and were trying to establish a democratic edu• cational system appropriate to a republican form of government. The problems they encountered on the way to this goal were not conquered, and they were largely unsuccessful. In a restricted sense, Hu Shih was right. Dewey's ideas found a reception among professional educators which had lasting conse• quences. In 1931 when a League of Nations team of educational experts surveyed China's schools, their report argued that the reliance on the United States system of education and philosophy of education had been excessive during the previous decade, and recommended a shift away from the United States model. 4 This influence was particularly evident at major academic centers where teachers were trained. A word of background concerning these institutions will be appropriate. When the first modern school system was instituted in 1903 in China, "higher normal schools" were to be set up by provinces for the professional training of teachers to staff secondary institutions. When the Republic was declared in 1912, the six exist• ing higher normal schools were put on the federal budget and sub• sumed under the Ministry of Education as national professional schools. 5 Most of them were later called teachers' colleges or affiliated with a university, as in the case of the most eminent• Nanking Higher Normal School. 6 Peking also had a higher normal school, which throughout the early Republic shared with its Nan• king counterpart the responsibility for supplying the populous northern and central coastal provinces with teachers. 7 The teachers' colleges in both Nanking and Peking became centers of Dewey's influence. Analysis of personnel and publica• tions from these institutions reveals a confirmation, on one level, of Hu Shih's hopeful predictions. In Nanking Dr. Kuo Ping-wen (P. W. Kuo), the first Chinese Ed.D. from Columbia's Teachers College, became the dean of Nanking Higher Normal School (Nan• kao) in 1915, and its president in 1919. He succeeded in having his