【Author's profile】Chen Jian, Editor-in-Chief of the book "Chinese Citizen Reader"; Editor-in-chief of the "Report on China's County Economic Development", which will be published by the National Academy of Administration Press.
In the second decade of this century, the first document issued for four consecutive years is related to the three rural issues and rural revitalization.
In 2020, the first document "on doing a good job in the key work in the field of "agriculture, agriculture and agriculture";
In 2021, Document No. 1 "Opinions on Comprehensively Promoting Rural Revitalization and Accelerating the Modernization of Agriculture and Rural Areas";
In 2022, Document No. 1 "Opinions on Comprehensively Promoting the Key Work of Rural Revitalization in 2022";
In 2023, Document No. 1 "Opinions on Comprehensively Promoting the Key Work of Rural Revitalization in 2023".
Rural revitalization needs to promote rural education and rural construction, otherwise, rural revitalization will be difficult to sustain.
The China of today is a continuation of the China of the past. This is reminiscent of the work done by a group of pioneers in rural education and rural construction in China in the 20s and 30s of the last century. The more representative ones include the Yanyang early Hebei Dingxian experiment, the Liang Shuming Shandong Zouping experiment, the Tao Xingzhizhuang Normal experiment, the Huang Yanpei Kunshan experiment, and the Lu Zuofu Luzhou new education experiment. The Dingxian experiment, which lasted for ten years at the beginning of Yanyang, had the most extensive international influence.
The education and rural reform experiments led by Yan Yangchu have had a wide impact on the scale of their scale, their long history, their rigorous organization, their careful planning, the large number of professionals involved in education and agriculture, and the depth and breadth of their use of modern educational theories to guide practice. It also has very important enlightenment and reference significance for the current promotion of rural revitalization and rural integration.
1. Yan Yangchu's contribution.
Yan Yangchu was born in 1890 and grew up in Bazhong, Sichuan. His father, Yan Meitang, was a private school teacher and was later hired to teach Chinese at the Gospel Hall. Yan Yangchu had the opportunity to receive Western-style education, and accepted the baptism of ** teaching, and since then he has believed in it all his life.
In the summer of 1916, Yan Yangchu crossed the ocean to the United States and entered the Department of Political Science at Yale University. At that time, the pillar of the Department of Political Science at the University was William Howard Taft, the twenty-seventh president of the United States. At this time, Taft was serving as a professor of constitutional law at his alma mater, Yale. As a former dominating American**, Taft is approachable and unpretentious. Once, he was more than 10 minutes late for class, and apologized to everyone on the spot as soon as he entered the classroom. This made Yan Yangchu feel very deeply. What Yan Yang first realized was that democracy needs to be based on the cultivation of daily habits. This also prompted Yan Yangchu to think that China has a tradition of "the people are precious and the monarch is light" since ancient times, but why can't ordinary people take it as a habit? Through the comparison of Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, and the United States, Yan Yangchu put forward the viewpoint that China's backwardness lies in backward education and that people's wisdom cannot be developed.
1. Civilian education began with the service of Chinese workers on the battlefield in France.
During World War I, about 150,000 Chinese laborers went to France. Due to the language barrier, Chinese workers have been on strike and intimidated from time to time. In June 1918, Yan Yang first went to France to serve as an officer of the Battlefield Chinese Labor Service Center. At that time, there were more than 5,000 Chinese workers in Brown, France, where Yan Yangchu was located, and not being able to contact their families was the most distressing thing for them. An important job of Yan Yangchu is to read family letters on behalf of others. He also founded the Chinese Workers Literacy Class. After four months, 35 students had completed their coursework and were able to write letters in more than 1,000 words they had learned. The local Chinese workers were amazed and came to participate. After the success of the literacy class, on January 15, 1919, Yan Yangchu initiated the founding of the ** Youth Association "Chinese Workers Weekly in France", and personally wrote an article for the "Chinese Workers Weekly", in which he for the first time combined the "three Cs" - Confucius (Confucius), *Christ, and coolie (coolie), Confucian open-mindedness, Jewish fraternity and sympathy for labor, and expressed his lifelong perseverance.
2. Dingxian experiment.
In 1920, Yan Yangchu returned to China, successively traveled to 19 provinces, and learned that about 85% of the people in China were illiterate at that time.
Yan Yangchu's work began with "eliminating illiteracy". He first selected 1,000 commonly used Chinese characters from many Chinese characters and compiled them into a "Thousand Words Course for Civilians" as a teaching material, and then organized large-scale citizen literacy campaigns in Changsha, Wuhan, Jiaxing, Yantai and other places.
In 1923, the "Chinese Association for the Promotion of Civilian Education" was formally established, and Yan Yangchu was appointed as the director general.
In August 1926, Yanyang Chu selected Zhili Dingxian (now Dingzhou, Hebei) as the experimental area to carry out the civilian education campaign and the popularization of agricultural science. In 1929, the family moved to Zhaicheng Village, Dongting Town, Dingxian County, Hebei Province, and lived there for nearly 10 years. In Dingxian, he and his colleagues from the China Association for the Promotion of Civilian Education started a vigorous experiment in rural construction, which can be called the primary version of the "rural revitalization" plan. It is known as the "Dingxian Experiment" in history. This is also the most influential experiment in rural construction in China in the 20s and 30s.
From the perspective of national character, Yan Yangchu summarized the problems of the Chinese at that time as the four major diseases of "ignorance, poverty, weakness, and selfishness."
Foolishness: lack of knowledge, most of them are illiterate;
Poor: Chinese's lives are on the line of life and death;
Weak: modern medical care, public health is not at all, people's bodies are weak and resigned to fate;
Selfishness: selfishness, disunity, non-cooperation, lack of training in the knowledge of modern citizens.
To this end, the "Dingxian Experiment" proposes to carry out the "four major educations".
To cultivate knowledge through literary and artistic education, the main measures include the promotion of civilian literature, civilian art, and rural drama, so as to solve the problem of "stupidity" of peasants;
Livelihood education to cultivate productivity, including livelihood training for farmers, teaching them various agricultural techniques, promoting cooperatives, improving animal and plant varieties, and creating handicrafts and other side industries to solve the problem of "poverty" of farmers;
Cultivate strong health through health education, set up a county-level health care mechanism, popularize health knowledge, develop health habits, carry out prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, and solve the problem of "weak" farmers;
Cultivating solidarity through civic education, and solving the problem of farmers' "selfishness" through education in the spirit of cooperation and the imparting of civic knowledge. The higher goal is "to inculcate a high degree of common sense in citizens", so that villagers can also have public awareness and participate in public management, and lay the foundation for the democratic transformation of China's rural areas.
But education cannot exist in isolation, it must be combined with construction. Education serves construction, which in turn promotes education. The key word of the "Dingxian Experiment" is construction. For example, the improvement of varieties, the improvement of irrigation tools, the organization of cotton purchase and marketing cooperatives, the establishment of village health clinics, and education are included in these construction work.
Through the cultivation of the above-mentioned four forces (knowledge, productivity, strength and unity), in order to create a "new people", and advocate the realization of the "six overall constructions" of politics, education, economy, self-defense, health and etiquette in the rural areas, so as to achieve the goal of strengthening the country and saving the country.
The above-mentioned "four major educations" are carried out through the "three major ways" of school, family and society.
Yan Yangchu is in Dingxian County, Hebei.
The Dingxian experiment lasted for ten years and achieved fruitful results. For example, improving the literacy rate of local residents, improving health care, and improving crops. According to the third census in 1980, Dingxian was the only county in the country without illiteracy. In 1934, smallpox was prevalent in the whole country, and a large number of people died in various places, while only two people were sick in the whole Dingxian County. In 1936, Dingxian County had zero incidence of smallpox, which was the only one in the country at that time.
3. Rural transformation goes international.
After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, Yan Yangchu moved to Hunan and Sichuan, and later settled in Xiema Farm in Beibei, Chongqing, to establish the China Rural Construction College. Based on the Dingxian experiment, the "West China Experimental Zone" was opened up at the same time. Hunan and Sichuan have been around for more than ten years.
During the period of the "West China Experimental Zone", Yan Yangchu and the Ping Church led by Yan Yangchu began to carry out "land reform" experiments, buying land from landlords and distributing it to farmers in a peaceful way. Later, Taiwan's land reform directly borrowed from the land reform experiment of the Ping Church in the mainland. Taiwan's land reform is considered a model for world learning.
During the Anti-Japanese War, when Guy Roosevelt** published the four great freedoms of mankind (speech, belief, freedom from want, and freedom from fear), Yan Yangchu pointed out that "the people's freedom from ignorance" was particularly important. This fifth freedom is the basis of the first four. Internationally renowned scholars have greatly appreciated Yan Yangchu's formulation of the "fifth freedom". The United Nations was founded in 1945 and its UNESCO programme for basic education has its roots in this.
In 1952, Yan Yangchu was commissioned by the International Committee of the Civilian Education Movement to visit Southeast Asia and the Middle East. He eventually chose the Philippines to practice the internationalization of his civilian education. He believes that the historical and cultural backgrounds of China and the Philippines are completely different, but the suffering of rural farmers is no different. The "Dingxian Experiment" has a feeling for Philippine farmers to prescribe the right medicine. He has assisted the Philippines in implementing a three-year plan for rural rehabilitation, and assisted Thailand in Asia, Guatemala and Colombia in Latin America in establishing rural rehabilitation promotion committees.
In May 1967, the "International Rural Transformation Institute" was established in the southern suburbs of Manila, and Yan Yangchu contributed 40 years of precious and rich rural transformation experience to countries around the world, he said: This is another new contribution of Chinese to world culture. Today, the World Rural Transformation Movement is centered on the International Rural Transformation Institute, forming a network with rural associations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to exchange experience and technology at any time and promote the continuous progress of rural economic and social construction in the third world.
In 1990, Yan Yangchu died in New York at the age of 100.
From 1918 in the Chinese Workers' Battalion on the battlefield of World War I to his death in New York in 1990, Yan Yangchu has only done one thing for more than 70 years, that is, to promote civilian education and rural construction around the world.
2. The ten great men who made the most revolutionary contributions in the modern world.
Yan Yangchu's civilian education and rural construction activities have had a wide impact both internationally and domestically.
In 1938, *** in Yan'an said that he "deeply admired Yan Yangchu's efforts to level the religious movement with the spirit of a religious family".
On May 24, 1943, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Copernicus's death, hundreds of higher academic institutions in the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, and other countries in the Western Hemisphere decided to meet in New York to form a committee to select 10 people who had made revolutionary contributions to the modern world in different fields. In order to allow the honorees to attend in person in New York to receive the honor, the selection was limited to those from all over the country on the American continent at the time. At the invitation of the people, Yan Yangchu participated in the "China Research Group on Post-war Issues" and was meeting in the United States at that time. Because of Yan Yangchu's contribution to civilian education, Yan Yangchu was finally selected. He also received this honor along with physicist Albert Einstein, philosopher John Dewey, automotive engineer Ford, and aircraft inventor Wright Brothers. Yan Yangchu was the only Asian among them.
The award speech to Yan Yangchu reads: "An outstanding inventor who enlightened the minds of thousands of illiterate people in the past by enlightening the knowledge of thousands of simplified and easy-to-use Chinese characters; It was he, the leader of the great people, who applied the scientific method to enrich their fields and increase the fruits of their toil."
Although this honor is given to Yan Yangchu personally, as Yan himself said, it is to the China Association for the Promotion of Civilian Education, and it is a commendation for its work in civilian education and rural construction in the turbulent China since 1920. For China, which was still in the midst of the arduous War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression at that time, Yan Yangchu received this honor, which was not only an affirmation of the cause of peace education led by Yan, but also reflected the attention of the international community to China at that time.
The Dingxian experiment was affirmed by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and the experience of Yan Yangchu was promoted to the whole country, and a rural construction education institute was set up, and a county was set aside in each province of China to carry out a pilot project of rural education. During this period, rural education experimental areas such as Dingxian Experimental County, Hengshan Experimental County, Xindu Experimental County and West China Experimental Zone were established successively.
In the autumn of 1945, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China set up the National Committee for Popular Education, hired Yan Yangchu as its chairman, and asked the Chinese Association for the Promotion of Civilian Education to set up an office in Nanjing in order to communicate with the Ministry of Education at any time.
In November 1945, the United Nations Cultural and Cultural Organization held its first meeting in Paris. Based on China's experience in civilian education, the conference formulated a basic education plan for cultural and educational organizations, with the goal of promoting basic education in undeveloped areas of the world, eradicating illiteracy, and instilling basic education.
After the liberation, China's internationally respected barefoot doctor system, the participatory community work method widely adopted by domestic NGOs, as well as the "whole village promotion" plan of the National Poverty Alleviation Office in recent years, and the current efforts of the United Nations to eradicate poverty around the world, can all see the figure of the "Dingxian Experiment".
Yan and his colleagues have been recognized and influenced by the world for their civilian education and rural construction in China.
In October 1955, the American magazine "Prospect" published an article listing Yan Yangchu as one of the 100 important figures in the contemporary world, and honored him as "the father of the world's civilian education movement".
In 1967, Marcos of the Philippines awarded Yan Yangchu the highest civilian medal "Golden Heart Medal";
In 1987, Reagan presented Yan Yangchu with the "Lifetime Achievement Award for Ending Hunger", praising him for "unswervingly promoting and developing a sustained and comprehensive plan to eliminate the root causes of hunger and poverty in the Third World for more than 60 years."
On October 25, 1989, George W. Bush of the United States sent a telegram to Yan Yangchu to congratulate Yan on his 99th birthday. By seeking to give help to those in distress, rather than handouts, you reaffirm the dignity and worth of the human person. I commend you for your efforts to lift civilians out of poverty by giving them more freedom and opportunities. You have made countless people realize that no one is just a mouth to eat, but a valuable person with unlimited potential, two working hands. You are an ode to our humanity and a role model for your peers.
In China, Yan Yangchu was once misinterpreted and completely faded from view. It was not until 1985 that Zhou Gucheng, then vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, came forward to invite Yan Yangchu to visit China and re-evaluate him, restoring his historical status as "a well-known civilian educator at home and abroad, an advocate and practitioner of the rural transformation movement". In 1985, Deng Yingchao, then chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, met with Yan Yangchu and praised him for his "lifelong commitment to civilian education and his contribution to China and the world."
Figure: Bazhong Yanyang Chu Museum.
In 2017, the leader mentioned in his speech at the ** Rural Work Conference, "When I was working in Zhengding County, Hebei Province, I had an in-depth understanding of Yan Yangchu's experiments, which opened civilian schools, promoted cooperative organizations, created experimental farms, taught agricultural science and technology, improved animal and plant varieties, and improved public health, and achieved some positive results." ”
Today, there are Yanyangchu Memorial Halls or museums in Dingzhou, Hebei, Bazhong City, Sichuan, and Beibei District, Chongqing.
More importantly, in recent years, a group of young volunteers have emerged one after another, as a new generation of rural builders, they named their rural construction bases after "Yan Yangchu", indicating that Yan Yangchu's career has an heir in his motherland and homeland.
Three or four revelations.
What kind of inspiration and reference does the rural construction implemented by Yan Yang have for the current China?
1. Enlightening the people's wisdom is still an urgent task for China.
More than 100 years ago, Liang Qichao wrote "Xinmin Said", he said: If there is a new people, there is no new system, new **, and new country. In Yan Yangchu's view: all problems arise from people. In China today, the work of "building people" is far from being completed, and the transformation from a traditional agricultural society to a modern society has not yet been completed, and "stupidity, poverty, weakness, and selfishness" can still be seen everywhere in China's rural areas, the people's wisdom has not yet been fully enlightened, and the people's strength has not been brought into full play. The freedom of the people from ignorance, especially from democratic ignorance, is still widespread. The construction of "democracy," the core socialist value, has a long way to go.
Inspiring people's wisdom is the top priority of rural revitalization, and it is also the top priority in China at present. The wisdom of the rural people has been greatly opened, the cultural construction has been strengthened, and the countryside has naturally radiated a new atmosphere of civilization; The improvement of national wisdom leads to the improvement of the civilization level of the whole country, which is undoubtedly good news to the world.
2. The "Four Great Educations" have a strong realistic character.
The "four major educations" proposed by Yan Yangchu still have a strong realistic character. For example, the popularization of health knowledge and the development of hygiene habits proposed by health education in the four major education are highly consistent with the healthy lifestyle proposed by the current Healthy China Initiative. Civic education is scarce and there is an urgent need for make-up classes.
3. The spirit of rural construction has important reference value.
Yan Yangchu proposed that rural construction must have the spirit of unity, hard work, creativity, loyalty, war, hard work, perseverance, freedom and independence, inconquerability and integrity, courage and diligence, etc., which has important reference value for promoting today's rural revitalization and rural education.
4. The important thing is to solve the problem.
An extensive, lasting and fruitful practice embodied in the rural transformation of Yanyang is a valuable asset at present. In the current era, especially among readers, there are many people who find problems, but too few people who solve them. The rural transformation of the early Yan Yang Dynasty was able to transcend the era in which it was produced, and have a lasting impact on modern education and rural construction in China, and encourage more people to participate in practical activities to solve problems. (*Normal Development***.)
Figure: Where Yan Yang has been in the early days of promoting international peaceful education.
References: 1. Interview with Yan Hongguo - "Talking about the Civilian Educator Yan Yangchu", book Translation of the History of the Thousand Autumns 2018, 2023-02-10.
2. Life is a big event: Yan Yangchu, a civilian educator, People, March 3, 2008.
3, Ren Wenjing, "Yan Yangchu: Light a lamp in the dark place of the world", Yanhuang Chunqiu**.