Their protest expanded to address other political and social issues, eventually becoming known as the May Fourth Movement.įor more than two millennia, the Confucian emphasis on learning had been a strength of Chinese culture. The students were upset that the victorious Allies planned to give German concessions in eastern China to the Japanese. On May 4, 1919, three days after the philosopher arrived in China, thousands of university students gathered in Beijing to protest the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. When Dewey was in Tokyo, a delegation of Chinese scholars visited and persuaded him to travel to China for a lecture tour.ĭewey’s trip coincided with a critical historical moment.
#Hundred days of school shirts series
For most of his career, Dewey had no special interest in China, but in the spring of 1919 he was invited to deliver a series of lectures in Japan. At the end of the nineteenth century, John Dewey, the American philosopher and educator, had pioneered the concept of the experimental, or laboratory, school. The school had no other American students or teachers, but early on it had been heavily influenced by ideas from the United States. It was never clear to us how or why this decision had been made.Ĭhengdu Experimental Primary School (Founded in 1918) Experimenting and Researching to Guide the Region Finally, with only four days until the start of the semester, just when we were starting to panic, a teacher informed us that the girls were welcome to attend. Meanwhile, Leslie and I tried to reach administrators and teachers at the school, mostly without success-it seemed that everybody was out of contact. We stayed in a Sheraton across the street from Chengdu Experimental, and a tutor came every morning to give Ariel and Natasha a crash course in Mandarin. This remained our plan when we moved to Chengdu, in August of 2019, three weeks before the fall semester.
We always had the idea that someday I would return to teach at a Chinese university, and the girls could learn the language through immersion. But the twins had never used these names, and Leslie and I hadn’t tried to teach them Mandarin. When Ariel and Natasha were born, in southwestern Colorado, in 2010, they were given proper Chinese names. Leslie is Chinese American, and we met while working as journalists in Beijing, more than twenty years ago. They would also be the only children who didn’t speak Mandarin. The school had no recent tradition of educating foreigners, and if the twins were to attend they would be the only Westerners in a student body of about two thousand. But administrators were noncommittal about admitting Ariel and Natasha. We’d come away with a good impression of Chengdu Experimental, which is considered to be perhaps the best public primary school in the city.
In the spring of 2018, we had travelled from our home in Colorado to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, in southwestern China, in order to visit schools. Thank you, dears 35 Li Jialing’s Mama and 13 Zhao Fan’s Mama.įor my wife, Leslie, and me, getting our daughters into Chengdu Experimental had been a long and mysterious process. There will be lots of people inside the classroom, it won’t be cold.įine, then we will also wear shorts.
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