John Dewey in China: To Teach and to Learn

2: DEWEY AS A TEACHER

13 chapter 2 D EWEY AS A TEACHER ‫ﱝﱝﱝﱝﱝ‬E‫ﱝﱝﱝﱝﱝ‬ As a teacher, Dewey taught the Chinese everything he knew. The corpus of his lectures in China consists of seven lecture series and myriad occasional talks, amounting to nearly 200 lectures. His lecture series delivered in Beijing, which Hu Shih translated, include “Social and Political Philosophy ,” “Philosophy of Education,” “Ethics,” “Types of Thinking,” and “Three Contemporary Philosophers.” His other two lecture series delivered in Nanjing address “The History of Philosophy” and “Experimental Logic.” The topics of his occasional lectures are often related to education and schooling. All of these lectures were interpreted and recorded in Chinese as Dewey delivered them and were later printed in newspapers and reprinted in periodicals. In addition to these lectures, Dewey’s own books, including School and Society (1899), Schools of Tomorrow (1915), Democracy and Education (1916), and Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920), were translated into Chinese and made available to the public during the early 1920s. As the first foreign scholar to be invited formally to lecture in China, Dewey became an instant celebrity. Wherever he went, he drew hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people to his lectures. As one U.S. journalist in Shanghai reported, “It may be guessed that by means of the spoken and the written, or printed, word Professor Dewey has said his say to several hundred thousand Chinese.”1 To the Chinese, Dewey’s lectures held the secrets to modern progress. If they could only know those secrets, they could build a modern China as powerful and prosperous as the United States. 14 john dewey in china Dewey as a Modern Confucius In October 19, 1919, a banquet was held in Beijing to celebrate Dewey’s sixtieth birthday—which happened to fall on the same day as the lunar birthday of Confucius. At the banquet, the Chancellor of Beijing University, Cai Yuanpei, seized on this special opportunity to portray Dewey as a modern-day Confucius. In his brief speech, Cai emphasized underlying similarities between Dewey and Confucius despite their differences: one embodies the spirit of modern West, and the other represents the wisdom of ancient China; one values democracy, equality , and creativity, and the other privileges monarchy, hierarchy, and tradition. According to Cai, Dewey and Confucius were both educators of the common people, shared the same faith in education as a vehicle for social change, and insisted on the unity of thought and action. Cai believed that these commonalities pointed to the possibility of “a merger between Eastern and Western cultures.”2 Interestingly, Dewey did not enjoy the honorific title exclusively—Bertrand Russell was also esteemed by his Chinese hosts as the “Second Confucius.”3 However, in terms of temperament and thought, Dewey was far more congenial to Confucius than Russell, who actually favored Daoism over Confucianism and found Confucius boring.4 Regardless of whether the comparison of Dewey to Confucius was appropriate, it took on a unique meaning in May Fourth China. Dewey was expected to take the discredited place of Confucius and assert himself as the new intellectual icon. Dewey’s presence as the embodiment of Western modernity served as a potent source of inspiration for May Fourth intellectuals who were eager to jettison their old tradition and follow the Western path. The spirit of iconoclasm was best exemplified in Chen Duxiu, who proclaimed, to follow “Mr. Democracy,” one should oppose Confucianism; to follow “Mr. Science,” one should oppose traditional arts and religion.5 In the eyes of many Chinese, Dewey came to embody “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.” The following discusses the content of Dewey’s lectures in relation to his images in China. Dewey’s experimental theory of inquiry made him well qualified as “Mr. Science.” His promotion of democratic ideals earned him the legitimate title of “Mr. Democracy.” His concerns for the education of the masses contributed to his reputation as the common people’s educator. The three topics on science, democracy, and education are chosen for many reasons. First, they constitute the major themes of Dewey’s lectures; second, they reflected the interests and concerns of his Chinese hosts; and third, they evoked considerable responses and criticisms from his audience. Dewey occasionally may have presented different schools of thought in an overly simplistic manner to make his lectures Dewey as a Teacher 15 readily accessible to his Chinese audience.6 I summarize Dewey’s discussion of these themes, my...