T'ao Hsing-chih (1891-25 July 1946), educational theorist and reformer who based his ideas on those of John Dewey and Wang Yangming. His theories of "life education" were embodied in the mass education and rural education movements of the 1920's and in the work-study and "national crisis education" programs of the 1930's.

Born into a family of small means, T'ao Hsing-chih spent the years from 1896 to 1905 in a traditional Chinese school, where his intelligence and retentive memory made a striking impression. In 1905, possibly because of the abolition of the examination system, he entered a Protestant missionary school. He majored in English and mathematics, completing the four-year course of study in three years. T'ao then entered the Protestant-run Chung-chi Medical School at Hangchow, but because he refused to be baptized and so forfeited a scholarship and because he lost faith in medicine as a career, he soon quit school and went to Soochow. He and a cousin studied together and eked out a meager living by pawning their clothes and other possessions. Finally, in 1911, T'ao entered the literature department of Nanking University.

It was at Nanking that T'ao first became involved with education and politics, the two subjects that were to preoccupy him for the rest of his life. As a student during and after the 1911 revolution, T'ao was an activist, sponsoring a political debating society and organizing a series of patriotic lectures. He also edited the university magazine, the Chin-ling kuang-hsüeh pao. Although enrolled in the literature department, T'ao retained his earlier interest in mathematics and developed new ones in the fields of education and philosophy. T'ao and his friends frequently discussed traditional Chinese thought in relation to the modern world. As a result of these explorations, T'ao became absorbed in the philosophy of the unorthodox Neo-Confucian Wang Yang-ming (1472-1529) and especially in Wang's theory of chih-hsing ho-i [the unity of knowledge and action]. He also was struck by Wang's theory of education as set forth in his Ch'uan-hsi-lu: "Give children a chance to develop freely. Guide them gently toward desirable ends." This maxim became the basis of T'ao's own theories, and, as an indication of his close identification with Wang, he adopted the courtesy name Chih-hsing [knowledge-action] .

In 1914, having again completed a four-year course in three years, T'ao was graduated at the top of his class. With the help of relatives, he set out that summer for advanced study in the United States. Because he then was contemplating a career in municipal government, he enrolled at the University of Illinois as a graduate student in political science. He took a course in educational administration which was taught by a former student of John Dewey, and it was this teacher who gave T'ao his first glimpse of the philosophical and educational system that Dewey was evolving. T'ao was so impressed that he transferred to Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1915, thereby tracing "the Deweyan stream to its source." At Teachers College, where he stayed until the summer of 1917 and where he immersed himself in Deweyan instrumentalism, T'ao decided to devote the rest of his life to education.

In the autumn of 1917 T'ao returned to China, where he began to evolve his own theory of "life education" (sheng-huo chiao-yü), based on the ideas of Dewey and Wang Yang-ming. The next 20 years were to see a working out of these ideas in concrete form, first by gaining a hearing for them and subsequently by embodying them in a series of practical projects which were adapted to meet China's specific needs at various times and which included mass literacy education, rural education, work-study education, education for national crisis, wartime education, nation-wide education, and finally, education for democracy. T'ao received an appointment to the staff of Nanking National Teachers College, but at first he found little audience for his new views. His attempt to reorganize the college on Deweyan principles was voted down; opposition within the education department obliged him to decline its chairmanship; and an eloquent article entitled "The Unity of Teaching and Learning," published early in 1919, received only scant notice. Undiscouraged, T'ao continued to preach the major tenets of Dewey's philosophy, above all the responsibility of the teacher to teach students to learn, to link teaching methods to learning methods, and to continue the pursuit of learning rather than to consider his own knowledge as static or final. The turning point for T'ao came only with the May Fourth Movement. The new tide of thought and action overwhelmed conservative opposition within the college (by then called Southeastern University), and T'ao, at last able to assume the chairmanship of the education department, initiated sweeping reforms.

With his assumption of the chairmanship of the prestigious education department of Southeastern University, T'ao became known as one of the leading interpreters of John Dewey to China. When Dewey toured China in 1919-21 T'ao translated for him during his Nanking lectures, which were sponsored jointly by Southeastern University and Peking University. An outgrowth of this inter-university contact was T'ao's participation from 1919 on in the group associated with the new monthly Hsin chiao-yü [new education], whose editor, Chiang Monlin (Chiang Meng-lin, q.v.], also had studied under Dewey at Columbia. T'ao wrote a number of articles on the improvement of Chinese education for the magazine, whose contributors also included Huang Yen-p'ei, Kuo Ping-wen, Lo Chia-lun, Hu Shih, and Ts'ai Yüan-p'ei (qq.v.). In the winter of 1921, this group helped found the Chung-kuo chiaoyu kai-tsao she [Chinese association for the improvement of education], with Ts'ai Yüanp'ei as chief sponsor. At the association's first meeting in February 1922 at Shanghai, T'ao was chosen executive secretary. At this time, he also became editor of Hsin chiao-yü, now the association's official organ.

In the years immediately following Dewey's tour and the founding of the association, T'ao began to promote his first large-scale project, the mass education movement. In June 1923 an association for mass education was formed at Nanking, and within two months the movement had spread to Wuhan and other cities. In August, the mass education association held its organizing convention at Tsinghua University in Peking, and a permanent headquarters was established with the wife of Hsiung Hsi-ling as chairman and James Yen (Yen Yang-ch'u q.v.) as executive secretary. Intensive promotion of the movement began in October, and by June 1924 the campaign had spread into 20 provinces and administrative areas. T'ao's theories as expressed in his conception of "life education" received characteristic embodiment in the mass education movement. From Wang Yang-ming he had learned that true knowledge must have practical consequences and that knowing and doing are one. From Dewey he had garnered an evolutionary theory of truth, as well as the idea that all forms of human activity are but instruments for problem solving. He also had learned from Dewey that democracy is the primary source of ethical value. With these concepts in mind, T'ao set out to create the vast literate public which alone, he thought, could provide an adequate basis for a democratic China. T'ao's "instrument" was the mass education movement—actually a mass literacy project, which was designed to achieve maximum results in the shortest time and thus was centered in the cities. Evening schools were opened, as were "people's reading circles," which consisted simply of any social unit—home, shop, factory, inn, temple—in which the literate could teach the illiterate. In addition, T'ao initiated the "each one teach one" movement, by which each newly literate person undertook to teach at least one illiterate, and he also founded numerous centers where itinerant workers, ricksha pullers, and the like could seek instruction. The mass education movement continued to grow until 1927, and T'ao continued to exhibit that single-minded enthusiasm and energy which Chiang Monlin described as his "missionary spirit." To identify himself with the common people, T'ao wore a plain cotton jacket, a pair of cotton trousers, and a skull-cap. As his colleagues frequently commented, T'ao was one of the "most thoroughly Chinese" of the students who had returned from studying abroad. By March 1927 the mass education movement had proved an unqualified success, but it also had come to be regarded as dangerous by conservative Kuomintang officials and local warlords, especially because T'ao's friends included many leftist writers and intellectuals. Under pressure from these leaders, T'ao took up a new project in March 1927. A month later, the mass education movement went into permanent decline. Having seen his efforts stifled in the cities, T'ao now turned to the country and rural education. In March 1927 he and Chao Shu-yu established an experimental teachertraining school at Hsiaochuang, a small village on the outskirts of Nanking. The Hsiaochuang shih-fan hsueh-hsiao [Hsiaochuang normal school] began operations in the simplest of circumstances with 13 students and tents for shelter. The Hsiaochuang program emphasized teacher training and village renewal. It sought to teach through practice the techniques of running a village school and to immerse the trainees in rural life, transforming their outlook by having them join the peasants in manual labor. The teaching method was entirely learning-by-doing. In addition to serving as a pioneer venture in the training of rural teachers, Hsiaochuang was designed as a prototype of the kind of school that was intended to accomplish village renewal throughout China. Because T'ao advocated the full gamut of life education and opposed learning exclusively from text books, he opened a new channel in Chinese education. To this end, he formulated such slogans as "life is education," "society is school," "unity of teaching, learning, and doing," and "action is the source of knowledge." By the end of 1 927 the school and its principles had achieved popularity and imitation.

Like the mass education movement, the rural education movement continued to nourish until, in 1930, it came under suspicion. In the autumn of 1930 Hsiaochuang was closed by the National Government, and T'ao, who had reason to believe that he was about to be arrested, fled to Japan. About this time, T'ao changed his courtesy name from Chih-hsing [knowledge-action] to Hsing-chih [action- knowledge], possibly signifying that in the future he intended to be less of a cloistered scholar and more of a participant in events. In any case, it was as T'ao Hsing-chih that he subsequently was known.

T'ao returned to China in the spring of 1931. For the next four or five years he engaged in a variety of educational activities. He wrote stories and rhymes for children, compiled a children's science series, and started a children's science correspondence school. He also translated several Western literary works, but the manuscripts perished in the 28 January 1932 bombardment of the Commercial Press by the Japanese. The fire was not a total disaster, however, for it led T'ao to his next major project. Realizing the importance of uniting the Chinese people for their own protection, T'ao organized the Sheng-huo chiao-yü-she [life education association] and started a fortnightly magazine to propagate this idea.

Drawing on his experiences at Hsiaochuang, T'ao developed the concept of the "work-study unit," designed to help the masses support themselves through their own efforts, understand themselves and their lives through study, and protect themselves through their united strength. He established the first work-study unit at Shanghai on 1 October 1932, and within a year the number of students had grown from about 1 1 to more than 300. Other units soon were formed, and by 1934 the movement had spread to 21 provinces. An important aspect of workstudy education was T'ao's initiation of the "little teacher" system, whereby school children became teachers to illiterate adults. As T'ao put it, "The school becomes a power house, and every child a wire reaching out from it to electrify the minds of the people." Accordingly, another association was founded by T'ao, which spread the "little teacher" system extensively among workers and villagers during 1933 and 1934.

By 1935, as the problem of Japan was becoming increasingly acute, T'ao's career began veering more markedly than before toward politics. To meet the national crisis, T'ao advocated what he called "national crisis education," a program of mass mobilization similar to his successful work-study program but geared to produce even quicker results. T'ao also organized an association to propagate the new theory and traveled widely on its behalf. In the summer of 1936 T'ao was accredited as a delegate to the World New Education Conference in London, at which he reported on aspects of life education and the "little teacher" system. While in Europe, T'ao also functioned as the representative of the year-old National Salvation Association, an organization established to present China's case to the world. A year later, he returned to Europe as a delegate to the World Anti-Aggression Conference in London. On this mission he seems to have traveled with the Communist delegate Wu Yü-chang (q.v.), and together they visited the tomb of Marx.

T'ao was in the United States when he learned that fighting had broken out between China and Japan on 7 July 1937. T'ao rallied overseas Chinese across the United States to the national cause and appealed to the American people to support China in the war of resistance by not supplying Japanese with armaments. He is also said to have enlisted Chinese laundries across the country in the cause of national salvation by having them introduce pro-Chinese propaganda into the pockets of freshly laundered garments. From the United States T'ao went on to visit more than 20 other countries to enlist their support for China, returning home by way of Hong Kong in the autumn of 1938. Upon his return to China, T'ao threw himself into the war of resistance with all of his customary energy. Having made his way to Kuomintang-controlled territory, he participated in the inauguration of a wartime education association and drafted a program for it. Wartime education was to be based on the principles of life education but adapted to the specific needs of the war, especially the need to preserve and mobilize the masses. At about the same time, T'ao established an emergency headquarters of the life education association at Kweilin and became its interim director general. In 1938 he was appointed to the People's Political Council at Chungking.

T'ao also set about to alleviate the conditions of the thousands of refugee children whom he had encountered on his journey into the interior. In June 1939 he established the Yü-ts'ai hsueh-hsiao [talent development school] at Peip'ei near Chungking for gifted orphans. The students were divided into eight sections (music, drama, dancing, literature, painting, social science, natural science, and nonspecialized) and were submitted to a curriculum which stressed life education. T'ao hoped that the school could become a model for nationwide education, and, in spite of his other pressing activities and a chronic want of funds, he maintained it.

The school and the People's Political Council were T'ao's major concerns during the war, but with the defeat of Japan his attention focused on the struggle for democracy and the impending civil crisis. He joined the China Democratic League, became a member of its central standing committee, and took charge of two of its publications. For various reasons, the league soon was subjected to harassment, and in January 1946 T'ao was hailed before a court on charges of having incited Yü-ts'ai students to violence. The facts of the case, however, seemed to be that the Yü-ts'ai students, far from provoking violence, had been beaten by Kuomintang agents at a large rally held in Chungking on 10 January 1946 to celebrate the success of the Political Consultative Conference, which had just engineered a shaky truce between the Kuomintang and the Communists. Shortly thereafter, T'ao left Chungking for Shanghai, where he became occupied with the rehabilitation of schools and new educational activities. His most notable project was the She-hui ta-hsueh [social university] established for and by working-class youths. The students even selected the trustees as well as the president. Life education at this juncture should have a social, and especially a political bias, T'ao thought; and the result, his theory of democratic education, was put into practice at Shehui ta-hsueh and other schools. By the middle of 1946 the civil war was again gathering momentum and urban unrest was increasing. In June 1946 T'ao took part in the huge public send-off from Shanghai of a delegation bound for Nanking to petition for peace. A month later, Li Kung-p'u and Wen I-to (q.v.), leaders of the China Democratic League, were both assassinated. T'ao was much disturbed and stated: "I suggest that if one person is sacrificed for the cause of democracy, ten thousand should be ready to take his place." It was then rumored that T'ao's name now headed the blacklist, and T'ao momentarily expected the "third shot." In an effort to put his affairs in order before the blow fell, T'ao worked day and night despite his tendency to high blood pressure. The strain proved too great, however, and he died at Shanghai of a stroke on 25 July 1946, at the age of 55. Among the many expressions of regret over his passing was one sent from Yenan by Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh (qq.v.), calling his death a great loss to the people of China. When his body was interred at the top of Mount Lao near Nanking, the old site of Hsiaochuang, no fewer than 53 organizations participated in the official funeral. In 1947 a memorial volume called T'ao Hsingchih hsien-sheng chi-nien-chi was published by a commemoration committee. It contained almost 700 pages of eulogies by more than 100 contributors including John Leighton Stuart, Kuo Mo-jo, Cheng Chen-to, Mao Tun, Ma Yin-ch'u, and Shih Liang.

Coming from a peasant's family and familiar with the hardships of the masses, T'ao maintained an intense interest throughout his life in the lot of the common people of China. He wore their clothes and spoke their language. His vernacular poems, actually folksongs written in the common people's own language, forged a link with the masses. He produced ten volumes of such folksongs, didactic in purpose and dealing with philosophical, political, and educational subjects. Occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, and funerals were all grist for his mill. In character T'ao was independent in thought, fearless in speech, and quick in action. He was more dedicated to the masses and the children than to his own family, more concerned about his friends than himself. Outwardly he appeared somewhat cold and quiet, but when he spoke, his thoughts and feelings vied for expression. He lived a very simple life, his only luxuries being peanuts and the theater. As an author T'ao first won fame as a translator of John Dewey and other Western educators. In 1922 he published Meng-lu-ti Chung-kuo chiao-yu Vao-lun [Paul H. Monroe on Chinese education] and in 1928 Min-pen chu-iyü chiao-yü, a Chinese version of Dewey's Democracy and Education. As an original writer, T'ao contributed many articles on education to periodicals. In addition, he wrote a number of books, of which the following are notable: P'ing-min ch'ien-tzu-k'o [1000-character basic reader for the masses], of 1924, compiled with the assistance of Chu Ching-nung; Chung-kuo chiao-yü kai-tsao [China's education reform], of 1928; Chih-hsing shu-hsin [letters of T'ao Chih-hsing], of 1929; Chiao-yu tso ho-i t'ao-lun [essays on education in the service of national unity], of 1930; Lao-shao t'ung ch'ien-tzu-k'o [1000-character basic reader for young and old], of 1934; Chung-kuo ta-chung chiao-yu wen-ti [the question of mass education in China], of 1936; and Yüts'ai hsüeh-hsiao shou-ts'e [Yü-ts'ai school handbook], of 1944. Works published after his death include: Hsing-chih shih-ko chi [poems of T'ao Hsing-chih] and T'ao Hsing-chih chiao-yü lun-wen hsüan-chi [selected works of T'ao Hsing-chih on education], both of 1947; T'ao Hsing-chih hsien-sheng i-chu [posthumous works of T'ao Hsing-chih], of 1949; Hsing-chih ko-ch'u chi [songs of T'ao Hsing-chih] and Wei chih-shih chieh-chi [the class of phoney intellectuals], both of 1950; and P'u-chi hsien-tai sheng-huo chiao-yü chih lu [the road to modern life education for all], of 1951. Books about T'ao include Mai Ch'ing's T'ao Hsing-chih and Tai Pei-t'ao's T'ao Hsing-chih-ti sheng-p'ing chi ch'i hsüeh-shuo [the life and thought of T'ao Hsing-chih], both of 1949; T'ao Hsing-chih hsien-sheng ssu-chou-nien chi [a memorial to T'ao Hsing-chih on the fourth anniversary of his death], published by the life education association, and Ho Kung-ch'ao's Lu Hsün ho T'ao Hsing-chih-ti i-shih [Lu Hsvin and T'ao Hsing-chih], both of 1950; and P'an K'ai-p'ei's T'ao Hsing-chih chiao-yü ssu-hsiang-ti p'i-p'an [a critique of T'ao Hsing-chih's theories of education], of 1952.

T'ao was survived by his second wife, Wu Shu-ch'in, four sons, and numerous grandchildren. His first wife, whom he had married in 1914, died in 1936. Te Wang: see Demchukdonggrub.