Educating Through Travel: Xin’an Children Travel Group and the Life Education Movement in 1930s China

In 1932, seven children from 12 to 15 years old who were students at Xin’an Element School in Huai’an County, Subei, self-organized the Xin’an Children Travel Group without adult supervision, traveling over 3,000 miles from Subei to Gansu and then back to Shanghai. In the 8-month trip, they were learning skills in order to work and support their travel expenses. They went to factories, schools, and institutions and were welcomed by the public, even giving a speech to share their travel experiences in Hujing University in Shanghai. As newspapers and magazines interviewed and reported the trip, their diaries were published into a book “Our Travelogues” (“women de lüxingji”) by the Children’s Bookstore in 1935.

The paper focuses on the Xin’an Children Travel Group’s trip as one specific episode of the ongoing “Life Education Movement” in the 1930s-40s promoted by the Chinese mass educator Tao Xingzhi. As demonstrated in their travelogues, the seven children’s learning-producing-transforming experiences along the trip defined travel as a process of mutual education for the visitors, the visited, and the readers. Their observations offered a distinct perspective on everyday life through which adults could understand shared crises and develop possible survival strategies under global fascism, war, and economic depression in the 1930s, from those who were normally considered illegitimate or premature initiators, doers, viewers, and thinkers. Meanwhile, it was through travel—as an educational and everyday life practice—and print culture, that a collective consciousness of a national community and a democratic sentiment of equality were simultaneously generated, which dynamically co-existed, but contrasted, with other forms of nationalism manipulated by state-party politics.