The development of Yan Yangchu

Yan Yangchu’s “Tao” of Rural Construction

Yan Yangchu was a famous educator and sociologist during the Republic of China. He devoted his life to civilian education and rural transformation in backward areas and was respected as a "The father of civilian education in the world" was once hired by the United Nations as a lifelong special adviser. In 1943, Yan Yangchu was elected as one of the "Top Ten Celebrities with the Most Contributions and Most Influences in the World", equal to Einstein. Yan Yangchu once compared himself to a missionary who educates the common people: "I am a missionary, and I teach civilian education. The starting point is benevolence and love." For this goal, he gave up the superior working conditions and comfortable living environment in the city, " "Step out of the ivory tower, step into the mud wall", "live together with the farmers", and become a "scientific preacher" in the countryside.

Yan Yangchu has been familiar with Confucian classics since he was a child, and has also received systematic modern Western education. In 1918, he went to France and served as the field service officer of the North American YMCA. He carried out effective literacy education activities among 200,000 Chinese workers in France, making 38 of them no longer illiterate. After returning to China, Yan Yangchu devoted himself entirely to civilian education activities. In 1923, he organized and established the China Civilian Education Promotion Association and served as the director-general. He believes that the key to China's civilian education lies in the countryside, and "if you want to transform into a peasant, you must first transform into a peasant." To this end, he successively organized colleagues to go to Changsha, Dingxian, Beibei and other places to promote civilian education. Among them, the Dingxian experiment lasted the longest (1926-1936) and had the greatest impact. In the process of promoting civilian education in Dingxian County, in order to better serve the local farmers, Yan Yangchu resolutely left Beijing in 1929 with his young wife Xu Yali and their infant baby, and moved his family to the remote and difficult Dingxian County. Wearing a coarse cloth coat and living in a farmer's leaky house", he settled here and lived there for eight years. He had a sincere confession: "We don't want to settle down on the imperial master's chair and make vain plans to mislead the people, so we go to find and solve problems in farmers' lives. We put aside our Eastern, Western, and urban glasses, and put on a pair of peasant glasses." Glasses." According to Yan Yangchu, education is not about "training" from above, but about "going to the countryside to seek knowledge" and "working hard to be an apprentice in the countryside." Inspired by him, some intellectuals also moved their families to Dingxian County with sincerity. They took off their suits and put on the coarse clothes of farmers. They lived with farmers for a long time and spread knowledge, forming an eye-catching The beautiful scenery of "doctors going to the countryside" to work with farmers.

In the Dingxian experiment, Yan Yangchu gradually formed the overall idea of ????rural construction. He classified the problems in China's rural areas into four categories: stupidity, poverty, weakness, and selfishness, and advocated treating them with the "four major educations" of literature and art, livelihood, health, and citizenship. In Dingxian County, the intellectuals of the "Ping Church" have written more than 600 kinds of folk books in a language that farmers can understand and in a way they like; they have selected 600,000 words of folk literature including drum lyrics, ballads, proverbs, stories, jokes, etc. Literary and artistic materials, collecting practical folk paintings, music scores, etc.; organizing singing competitions, rural drama clubs, and holding various literary and artistic activities to save farmers from their "foolishness" and cultivate their "intellectual skills." They conduct agricultural scientific research, establish experimental farms, improve pig and chicken breeds, conduct "livelihood training" for farmers, open livelihood traveling training schools, and train enthusiastic and capable young and middle-aged farmer "volunteers" to serve as "demonstration farmers". to lead other farmers in using new technologies. Farmers' self-help societies, cooperatives, and cooperative federations are also organized to carry out economic activities in credit, purchasing, production, and transportation to cure farmers' "poverty" and cultivate their "productivity." They implemented health education, popularized health knowledge, and cultivated health habits. They also established a three-level medical and health system in rural areas. Health workers were set up in villages, health clinics were set up in associated villages, and health centers were set up in counties to save the "weakness" of farmers and cultivate their "strongness". force". They conduct civic education for farmers to save their "privacy" and develop their public consciousness and cooperative spirit.

Yan Yangchu paid special attention to the civic education of farmers and pointed out: "If farmers' knowledge has been cultivated, production technology has been improved, scientificized, and their bodies have become strong, if there is no unity, the so-called people's power will be lost." Cultivation has completely lost its purpose and is in vain!" He regarded civic education as the center of civilian education and created a set of "organized education" methods to improve national consciousness, such as compiling stories of historical figures into pamphlets and sending them to villagers to read. , cultivating their national consciousness through the familiar stories of farmers such as Yue Fei; after allowing farmers to receive simple education in civilian schools, they mobilized them to organize classmate associations, so that Chinese farmers had a self-organized community life for the first time. Later, these classmates The meeting became the basis for Yan Yangchu’s democratic transformation of the countryside. At the same time, Yan Yangchu also led the establishment of a township and county council organization in Ding County. He recruited some active and enthusiastic people to form a citizen service group, allowing farmers to participate in the citizens' assembly of the township, or the management committee of the county or town, and the rural transformation committee. Cultivate their awareness of corporate governance by getting involved in corporate governance.

In the process of "scientific evangelism", Yan Yangchu's greatest creation was to closely integrate civilian education with rural transformation and promote it as a whole. Yan Yangchu believes that the goal of civilian education is to adapt to real life, improve real life, create real life, and achieve national redevelopment. Therefore, it is useless to provide civilian education in rural areas if we only teach farmers to read and master some skills without teaching them to use these skills for rural construction: “Education without construction will be in vain and will not help. of China’s rural society at present.” In order to carry out rural construction, Yan Yangchu has carried out three important tasks. One is to strengthen rural education and send knowledge to the countryside. Through measures such as disseminating basic agricultural knowledge, improving crop varieties, and preventing and controlling diseases and pests, "making agricultural science deep into the people"; Yan Yangchushen We know that if we want to improve the quality of farmers, we must make "farmers scientific", and if we want to make farmers scientific, we must make "science simple." In order to improve the economic life of farmers in Ding County, the Ping Church led by Yan Yangchu did a lot of detailed work, such as improving cotton seed selection and increasing the egg production rate of hens. The second is to conduct research and investigation on farmer education. Yan Yangchu opposed "education for the sake of education" and advocated that intellectuals should "find materials from farmers' lives", live and work with farmers, study their education status, and compile applicable teaching materials according to their needs so that the results of education can be achieved Become a force for rural construction, promote and promote the realization of a new civil society. The third is to carry out rural census work, and have completed rural social surveys, industrial surveys, rural population surveys, rural overview surveys, etc., making relatively sufficient preparations for the launch of rural construction.

The transformation of Dingxian County was a key experiment carried out by Yan Yangchu to promote national civilian education and social improvement movements, and achieved good social results. On the basis of rural autonomy, Ding County was the first in China to achieve county-level autonomy under the framework of "constitutional spirit." By extension, Hebei Province has also become a model province for "autonomy." As a model that can be promoted and replicated, the Dingxian model set an example for rural construction in other places at that time. According to survey data from Hebei Province in the early 1980s, due to the work of the Ping Church, Dingxian became an illiterate county before the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War and eradicated smallpox; and the well-bred pigs, high-quality poplars and apples introduced by the Ping Church were still well-known in Hebei , make people rich.

Yan Yangchu often said that the "Three Cs" have influenced my life. The "Three Cs" he mentioned are Confucius, Christ and Coolies. Specifically, it comes from the traditional Confucian people-centered thought of ancient China, the Christian spirit from the West, and the people's suffering and people's wisdom from the grassroots. He warned the world: "What is the most basic element of the world? Gold or steel? Neither, the most basic element is the people! When talking about a better world, we indeed need people with better quality." Yan Yangchu made a promise very early: "I will not be an official, I will not get rich, and I will dedicate my life to the working people." Looking at his life, I believe it.