Jack Neubauer published the article “Save the Adults: The Little Teacher System and the Politics of Childhood in Modern China” in a special Spring 2023 issue of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth focused on the history of children in East Asia. In this piece, Digital Childhoods editor Hannah Stamler chats with Dr. Neubauer about what the little teacher system can teach us about modern Chinese history and the global history of childhood.
Your article introduces readers to the “little teacher system” in 1930s China. For those who haven’t yet read the piece, it would be great to have a preview of your topic. What was the “little teacher system” and who were its “little teachers”?
The little teacher system was a plan to rapidly increase literacy in China by mobilizing schoolchildren to educate illiterate adults. It was the brainchild of Tao Xingzhi, a prominent Chinese educator who had studied with John Dewey at Columbia University Teachers College. In practice, the system required elementary school students to serve as “little teachers” by teaching basic reading and writing skills to illiterate adults in their neighborhood for at least 30 minutes per day.
Tao Xingzhi believed that the little teacher system was uniquely suited to the conditions of rural poverty and imperialist encroachment in 1930s China. Due to widespread poverty, Tao believed that it would take decades for China to train enough teachers and build enough schools to achieve universal literacy through formal education. In the meantime, he hoped that by mobilizing all of China’s approximately 11 million elementary school students to serve as little teachers, China could achieve universal basic literacy in time to stave off the threat of an imperialist invasion.
As you describe him, Tao Xingzhi was a radical thinker for investing in children’s present versus future skills. Can you say more about the fascinating temporality of his ideas?
In 1930s China—as across much of the world today—it was common to refer to children as the “masters of the future.” And since the late nineteenth century, Chinese intellectuals had promoted new-style schools and “scientific” parenting practices in order to raise children who would one day become the kind of modern adult citizens China needed to survive in the competitive international order.
Tao Xingzhi had two main criticisms of the idea that children were the “masters of the future.” First, he argued that by assuming that children could only contribute to social change when they were all grown up, educators denied children the opportunity to contribute to society in the present. And considering the immediate threat of Japanese imperialism, Tao feared that the future toward which educational institutions were oriented would arrive too late to save the Chinese nation from extinction. Children were not just the masters of the future, Tao argued that they were also the “little masters of the present.”
Moreover, like many intellectuals of his time, Tao believed that China had become an “aged” and “feeble” civilization relative to more “youthful” and “vigorous” modern societies in the West. Tao argued that in a modern society, adults helped children to move forward through typological time, teaching them the cutting-edge knowledge, skills, and habits of the contemporary world. However, in an “old” society like China, as children learned from adults, they actually moved backward through typological time. He argued that Chinese adults, already steeped in an obsolescent Confucian culture, could not help but turn children into “little old masters,” walking anachronisms unsuited to the needs of the modern world. If Chinese children were permitted to educate adults, then those adults might begin to age in reverse—recovering their youthful spirit as they learned from their little teachers. Therefore, Tao argued, previous attempts to “save the children” in China were going about things the wrong way. It was children who needed to save the adults.
By your own account, the little teacher system failed to achieve its goals; and yet, your article makes the case that it is still worth our attention. Why? What does the little teacher system help us understand about Chinese history and the global history of childhood?
The stated goal of the little teacher movement was to rapidly achieve universal basic literacy. By that measure, it certainly was a failure. The little teacher system had no measurable impact on national literacy rates and China did not achieve near-universal literacy until the 1990s.
Nevertheless, I think the little teacher system has a lot to teach us about both modern Chinese history and the global history of childhood. Throughout Chinese history, age has been associated with wisdom, and deference to older generations was deeply entrenched in law and social ethics. By mobilizing children to educate adults, the little teacher movement constituted a radical inversion of traditional age-based hierarchies. While the little teacher system itself did not achieve its goals, it inaugurated a new era in Chinese history in which it was often thought that children had much to teach adults. We can see this, for example, in the mobilization of elementary school students as “little red guards” during the Cultural Revolution.
In the context of global history, the little teacher movement constituted a new conceptualization of childhood that explicitly departed from both traditional practices and Western models. Tao Xingzhi was highly critical of traditional Chinese education; however, he also rejected Western educational models, such as universal public education, as impossible to implement in China (at least in the short term). Tao believed that China needed a new conceptualization of childhood suited to the specific conditions of rural poverty and imperialist encroachment. These were conditions he believed China shared not with the modern West, nor with China’s own pre-modern past, but rather with other victims of imperialism. For example, Tao Xingzhi traveled in Southeast Asia and India to discuss the little teacher movement with educators interested in Asian alternatives to colonial education. I think the little teacher system can serve as a case study for how anti-imperialist struggles generated new notions of childhood beyond Western models and inherited traditions—and it also points to the transnational connections between educators and child experts across the Global South.
How did you come to study the little teacher movement and Tao Xingzhi? What were your motivations, academic or personal?
I came across the little teacher movement by chance while conducting research for my PhD dissertation on the history of international child welfare work in China. I was reading letters that Chinese children in child welfare institutions had written to foreign sponsors through child sponsorship programs in the 1930s–40s, and I found that some children wrote about serving as little teachers. When I tried to figure out what it meant to be a little teacher in 1930s China, I quickly realized that the little teacher system was one of the largest educational experiments in modern Chinese history and also that there was very little scholarship about it.
After finishing my PhD, I needed some time and space away from my dissertation before I felt emotionally and intellectually prepared to begin revising it into a book manuscript. I decided to research Tao Xingzhi and the little teacher movement and to write this article as a fun side project before focusing back on my book manuscript.
We loved how your article provided a thorough view of the little teacher system, from its conceptualization to its actual (often challenging) implementation. Could you tell us more about the sources you used to capture both sides of this story: What materials did you use? Where did you find them?
At the level of conceptualization, I was happy to discover that Tao Xingzhi, the creator of the little teacher system, wrote prolifically about his ideas. Beyond Tao Xingzhi himself, there was wide discussion and debate about the little teacher system in education-focused periodicals as well as in books, magazines, and newspapers from the 1930s–50s.
I then turned to different genres of sources to understand how the little teacher concept was implemented at different levels. For instance, several provinces and municipalities promulgated official policies for implementing the little teacher system. I also looked at textbooks developed specifically for use by little teachers as well as the forms used by teachers and students to track the progress of little teachers. School administrators and (adult) teachers across China also used education journals as a forum for exchanging experience and advice, and many sent in candid articles about their difficulties and failures implementing the little teacher system. Finally, I tried my best to understand the experiences and opinions of little teachers themselves. Mostly, I was able to do this through the accounts and testimonials of little teachers that were published in periodicals and newspapers at the time. Some of these accounts present a very rosy portrait of little teacher work that likely did not reflect the experiences of most little teachers. However, when school administrators sent in reports about their struggles to implement the little teacher system, they often included the testimonials of children who aired their frustrations and grievances.
Did your piece change significantly from first draft to final revision? If so, in what ways?
Perhaps the biggest change from rough draft to final revision was the length. As I accumulated sources and wrote out my findings, my first draft quickly ballooned to well beyond acceptable article length. In revising the article, I tried to focus on what audience I wanted to reach and what core ideas I wanted to communicate to that audience. Since much of my other work is geared toward trying to convince China scholars of the importance of childhood, for this article I decided I wanted to introduce a Chinese history case study to non-China scholars interested in the history of childhood more generally. Once I decided that I wanted to write the article with non-China specialists in mind, I was able to go back through my long-winded first draft and cut out a lot of historical background, minutiae, and historiographical asides that would not be relevant or interesting to people beyond the modern China field.
As scholars, we tend to gather far more sources than can actually fit into our final published articles or books. With that in mind, we’re curious to know if there was a particularly interesting document or bit of archival material that you weren’t able to include in your piece.
As I mentioned, the sources that originally led me to the little teachers were letters that Chinese children had written to foreign “foster parents” as part of child sponsorship programs in the 1930s and 1940s. However, as I began to research the little teacher system systematically, I found many other sources in which little teachers discussed their experiences in much greater detail and, in some cases, with greater latitude to air their difficulties and frustrations. By the final draft, I only had one citation left to a child sponsorship letter, which forms the basis of the article’s opening anecdote. While I was disappointed not to include more children’s letters, these letters constitute the central source base for my first book (more on that below!), so I knew I’d have the opportunity to fully unpack them elsewhere.
Do you have plans to continue expanding the research in your article? If not, are you working on another research project you’d like to share with us?
At least for now, I’m leaving the little teachers aside to focus on other research. Right now, I’m finalizing the manuscript for my first book, Adopted by the World: China’s Children and the Rise of Global Humanitarianism, which is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.
Adopted by the World offers a new, bottom-up account of the rise of global humanitarianism that places the recipients of humanitarian aid in China at the center of the story. Focusing on the adoption plan for international child sponsorship during WWII and the Cold War, it reveals how humanitarianism became enmeshed with new practices of global intimacy that enabled foreign donors to build personal relationships with Chinese children through the exchange of photographs, gifts, and translated letters. Based on more than 500 letters written by Chinese children to foreign sponsors, as well as a wide range of Chinese archival documents, I argue that Chinese relief institutions associated with both the Nationalist and Communist parties mobilized the affective ties between children and sponsors to secure international support for their competing political projects. Challenging decades of scholarship that has focused on the political motives of Western humanitarian organizations, Adopted by the World demonstrates that it was often the Chinese recipients of aid, rather than Western donors, who were best able to control its material and ideological uses.
To end on a personal note, we’d like to ask you about a few of your favorite things…
Favorite way of managing notes and/or citations?
I use Evernote. I like that it’s clean, pretty minimalist, and easy to navigate. I make a note for each individual source, which I group into “notebooks” and categorize with tags. I have colleagues who use much more sophisticated methods to manage their research projects, but I find that this works well for me.
Best book in the history of childhood and youth you’ve read in the past year? (Does not have to be something that was also published in the last year.)
I recently read Yue Du’s book State and Family in China: Filial Piety and its Modern Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2021). It’s a fascinating study of the transformation of intergenerational power dynamics in modern Chinese history, focusing on shifting power relations between children and parents and the rise of new concepts like children’s rights and legal majority in Chinese law. It’s also a very engaging read full of richly detailed stories of intense family drama based on Du’s research in local archives. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of childhood and family!
Best piece of advice you remember receiving as a child?
My dad had several good mantras that he would repeat to my sister and me as kids. One of my favorites was “Don’t get killed; don’t get caught.” It was his pithy way of encouraging us to have fun while reminding us not to get into too much trouble.
And in keeping with your article’s theme of education, what was your favorite subject in elementary school?
Probably English, which I think was called “Language Arts” at the time. I always liked reading and writing, and I was never especially great at math or science.
Jack Neubauer is an Assistant Professor of History at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. He is a historian of China and the modern world with particular interests in global humanitarianism, childhood and youth, and US-China relations. His article, “Adopting Revolution: The Chinese Communist Revolution and the Politics of Global Humanitarianism,” received SHCY’s 2020 Fass-Sandin Prize for best English-language article. His first book, Adopted by the World: China’s Children and the Rise of Global Humanitarianism, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press.
