Tao Xingzhi

Tao Xingzhi (; October 18, 1891 – July 25, 1946), was a renowned Chinese educator and reformer in the Republic of China mainland era. He studied at Teachers College, Columbia University, and returned to China to champion progressive education. His career in China as a liberal educator was not derivative of John Dewey, as some have alleged, but creative and adaptive. He returned to China at a time when the American influence was zesty and self-confident, and his very name at that time (zhixing) meant "knowledge-action," reflecting the catch-phrase of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming which implied that once knowledge (zhi) had been obtained, then action (xing) would be easy. Biography Returning from study in the United States at University of Illinois and Columbia University, in 1917, he joined Nanking Higher Normal School and then National Southeastern University (later renamed National Central University and Nanking University), and he turned to "life education." He then also returned to his humble roots. "Originally," he wrote to his beloved younger sister, "I was a common Chinese, but gradually through ten years of life as a student, I developed a foreign, aristocratic tendency." Shanghai, the capital and center of modern/foreign China, he now found "vulgar, rushed, and crowded." Then "suddenly, like the Yellow River breaking its dikes..., I woke up [juewu, the Buddhist term for satori] to the fact that I was being robbed of my Chineseness." He took to wearing a traditional scholar's gown, and turned to mass education. He then reversed his name to the more well-known form, xingzhi, that is, "action-knowledge," directly implying that (Chinese) action/praxis will produce (Chinese) knowledge. He denounced "false intelligentsia" (wei zhishi jieji) for drawing on second hand, foreign experience of which they had no authentic knowledge. In December 1921, Cai Yuanpei, Tao, and other educationists founded the National Association for the Advancement of Education (Zhong-Hua jiaoyu gaijin hui) and he was elected as secretary-general. Through the society the educationists promoted the forming of modern education system in China.