National salvation through education: Tao Xingzhi's educational radicalism (China, John Dewey)

Tao Xingzhi's (1891–1946) educational radicalism was an outstanding achievement of the Chinese intellectuals in their search for ways to modernize China. Characterized by pragmatism, populism, and utopianism, Tao's educational radicalism was in constant tension with promoters of new education, Chinese intellectuals and the Nationalist government. Tao's radical social vision of a classless society, rooted in Confucian utopianism, and cross fertilized with John Dewey's philosophy and the Chinese revolutionary discourse enabled him to conceptualize a theory of life education. Through radical educational and social reforms Tao sought to integrate intellectual and manual labor, school and society, education and life in order to create new men and women, a new society and a new world.; The major American scholarship on Tao Xingzhi has mainly focused on Tao's relationship with Dewey. This narrow focus has blocked from our vision other sources and forces of equal or greater importance. Although a recent study has shifted its focus to pre-and-post Deweyan influences on Tao, its denial of Dewey's central importance in shaping Tao's theory of life education is rather a leap of faith than a factual conclusion. My study concurs with the mainstream scholarship on the central importance of Dewey in helping Tao to formulate his theory of life education. But I believe that there were more important intellectual and social forces at work, which facilitated his theoretical maturity in revolutionizing Dewey's philosophy of education.; In my study of his theory of life education, I find a discrepancy between Tao's radical social vision of a classless society and Dewey's gradualist philosophy of education. To overcome this contradiction between revolutionary social vision and gradualist means, Tao had to create a more powerful revolutionary educational theory and social strategy. I argue that to understand why and how Tao revolutionized Dewey's philosophy of education it is necessary to examine how his radical vision interacted with the various intellectual and social forces in the 1920s and 1930s. And I conclude that Tao should be understood as an educational and social revolutionary rather than a Deweyan reformer in the formation of his theory of life education.