From “Bookworms” to “Scholar-Farmers”: Tao Xingzhi and Changing Understandings of Literacy in the Chinese Rural Reconstruction Movement, 1926–34

            The mid-to-late 1920s witnessed a dramatic expansion of popular education in China, as reformers who had previously spearheaded urban literacy campaigns and workers’ schools turned their attention to rural China as part of a broader “Rural Reconstruction Movement.” This paper examines the pedagogical theory and teaching practice of a key leader of this movement, Tao Xingzhi, who demonstrates that this shift from the city to the countryside also prompted a fundamental re-evaluation of literacy as a basic goal of popular education. Whereas mass literacy was once broadly viewed as a normative good in and of itself, reformers like Tao increasingly came to view literacy merely as a practical “tool” with which to do work and his Xiaozhuang Experimental Normal School took as its focus the creation of economically productive citizens. In highlighting the changing goals and curricular materials of rural education reformers like Tao, I suggest that this re-evaluation of literacy from a moral end to a practical means signaled an important shift in the understanding of citizenship itself, as reformers who had previously conceived of Chinese citizens as a social and political community defined by shared values now saw citizenship as predicated on an individual’s ability to contribute economically to the nation-state.  These debates over literacy and citizenship, often spearheaded by pedagogues who had studied abroad but remained weary of “Western” education models, also help illustrate the extent to which Chinese popular education reformers sought to imagine citizenship outside the norms dictated by European political experience. More broadly, these debates signal literacy education as an important arena in which notions of citizenship became legible to a broad spectrum of Chinese students, teachers, and administrators.