T'ao Hsing-chih

Tao Xingzhi (T'ao Hsing-chih)
Chinese educator
Native name	陶行知
Born	October 18, 1891 She County, Anhui, China
Died	July 25, 1946(1946-07-25) (aged 54) Shanghai, China
Nationality	China
Alma mater	Columbia University

Tao Xingzhi (Chinese: 陶行知; pinyin: Táo Xíngzhī; Wade–Giles: T'ao Hsing-chih; 1891–1946), 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.

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.