172.The
New Thought Tide: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor
Gatto from archive.org
The
New Thought Tide
The great forced
schooling plan even long ago was a global movement. Anatomizing its full scope is well beyond my power, but
I can open your eyes partway to this poorly understood dimension of our pedagogy. Think of China, the
Asian giant so prominently fixed
now in headline news. Its revolution which ended the rule of emperors and empresses was conceived, planned, and
paid for by Western money and intellectuals and by representatives of prominent families of business, media,
and finance who followed the green
flag of commerce there.
This is a story
abundantly related by others, but less well known is the role of ambitious Western ideologues like Bertrand
Russell, who assumed a professorship at the University of Peking in 1920, and John Dewey, who
lived there for two years during the 1920s. Men like this saw a unique chance to paint on a vast blank canvas
as Cecil Rhodes had shown somewhat
earlier in Africa could be done by only a bare handful of men.
Listen to an early
stage of the plan taken from a Columbia Teachers College text written in 1931. The author is John Childs,
rising academic star, friend of Dewey. The book, Education and the Philosophy of Experimentalism:
During the World War,
a brilliant group of young Chinese thinkers launched a movement which soon became nationwide in its
influence. This movement was called in Chinese the "Hsin Szu Ch'au" which literally translated means
the "New Thought Tide." Because
many features of New Thought Tide were similar to those of the earlier
European awakening, it became
popularly known in English as "The Chinese Renaissance." While the sources of this
intellectual and social movement were various, it is un- doubtedly true that some of its most
able leaders had been influenced profoundly by the ideas of John Dewey.... They found intellectual tools almost
ideally suited to their purposes
in Dewey's philosophy.... Among these tools... his view of the
instrumental character of thought,
his demand that all tradition, beliefs and institutions be tested continuously by their capacity to meet
contemporary human needs, and his faith that the wholehearted use of the experimental attitude and method
would achieve results in the
social field similar to those already secured in the field of the natural
sciences.
At about the time of
the close of the World War, Dewey visited China. For two years, through lectures, writing, and
teaching, he gave in-person powerful reinforcement to the work of the Chinese Renaissance
leaders.
It's sobering to
think of sad-eyed John Dewey as a godfather of Maoist China, but that he certainly was.
No comments:
Post a Comment