1957: A Fatal Year for Progressive Education in China

During the Republican era, students of John Dewey made progressive views on children and education a leading trend among reform-minded Chinese. After 1950, however, the Chinese Communist Party condemned Dewey and his Chinese followers and designated the late Stalinist version of Soviet pedagogy as the new foreign model in the education field. After outlining the key features of progressive education, the article discusses its fate in China during the 1950s, with a focus on 1957 when two of its key proponents, Chen Heqin and Zhang Zonglin, discreetly tried to rehabilitate central aspects of progressive education but ended up being condemned as rightists. The Anti-Rightist campaign thus effectively excluded progressive views and practices from the repertoire of Chinese education. The final section of the paper discusses the consequences of this development for Chinese education in the following two decades.