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.
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