The Imperial Production of a New Mentality: Progressive Education in Revolutionary China

Progressive educators were enthusiastic participants in early 20th century campaigns to establish America’s empire, but democratic and radical activists around the world also embraced progressive education, and American progressive educators promoted overseas reform. Progressive education in China epitomized this intersection of imperialism and emancipation. This paper explores how John Dewey and other US educators made sense of education for China, how intellectuals and activists there responded to progressive education, and finally, how this experience impacted claims about progressive education in the United States.

From 1919 to 1921, Dewey delivered perhaps two hundred lectures in China. The talks were covered extensively in the press, and numerous Chinese reformers drew on Dewey. A growing body of historical scholarship has found Dewey’s reception in China to epitomize the appeal of progressive education reflected the efforts of democratic movements in more or less autonomous societies.[1]

The common commitments of Dewey and Chinese reformers were no coincidence. Leading Chinese reformers had studied with Dewey at Teachers College. This paper situates Dewey’s ideas about China, like the Chinese reception of those ideas, within a global, rather than comparative, framework. Dewey traced China’s lack of progressive education and the United States’ capacity to lead China’s modernization to America’s pioneer heritage. Chinese reformers’ American experience endowed them with a can-do spirit, but the absence of a frontier left the China “a civilization crowded with traditions and superstitions as well as people.”[2]

The paper concludes that America’s imperial role in China contributed to both the appeal and the eclipse of progressivism in Chinese education; and that Dewey’s discussion of China illuminates the central role of settler colonialism in progressive pedagogy and thought.

[1] E.g. Sun Youzhong, “John Dewey in China: Yesterday and Today,” Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society 35 (1999): 74.

[2] Guoqi, Chinese and Americans, 223.