tendencies of modern industrial society and its capacity to make people see what is essential in their world rather than slavishly seeking material gain. To illustrate his thoughts on the importance of poetry, he declared: “Poetry is like the sound of the rhythm in the void, is like the color in phenomena, is like the moon in the water, the image in the mirror. There is an end in words but the meaning will waft on forever.”75
A year after his marriage to Ts’a Sieu-Tsu, Chang completed his doctoral degree at Columbia University. His dissertation was titled “Education for Modernization in China” and was published as a book the following year.76 The overarching aim of Chang’s monograph was to analyze educational reforms in the particular context of China’s modernization. In his view, this modernization should be premised on the need to preserve the inner core of China’s traditional culture. Chang’s wide-ranging analysis of Chinese civilization focused on the factors that had enabled the West to achieve a much higher degree of technological development and material growth than China during the previous two centuries. Science, individuality, and democracy have been the authentic voices of the modern age, according to Chang. The sudden and extensive expansion of the European peoples following the discovery of America conditioned the striking progress of modern Europe. Curiosity, imagination, exploration, and the will to make comparison were encouraged during these times of expansion. In a so-called frontier society equality, community and individual initiatives were also encouraged.77
Chang argued that only by means of modernization’s processes, not its products, could the special character of a national culture be revitalized and adapted to entirely new circumstances. His analysis also examined what he regarded as the dark sides of economic and technological growth in the West. His dissertation criticized the spirit of competition and the materialism in Western societies, which had resulted in crassness, insensitivity, and cruelty. Chang was concerned that a powerful desire for modernization would lead China to develop into just one more superficial, materialistic nation. His own study urged students to remain always mindful of those intrinsic human values that can counter the impulse to imitate Western trends blindly.
It is interesting that Chang’s dissertation contained normative statements about the potentials and limitations of cultural change. Chang’s view of knowledge evidently allowed for an academic study to contain more than simply empirical descriptions, explanations, interpretations, and logical analyses. For him, an academic study could also contain arguments about normative issues relating to what we might call adequate civic education and constructive cultural exchange. This was not an uncommon perspective at the time: many academic monographs in the humanities and social sciences shared the same theoretical premises regarding knowledge.
It is interesting, too, to note that this motif—attending to what is central in Chinese culture as it encounters other cultures—is also present in Chang’s earlier writings on how a Christian mission ought to profile itself with regard to Chinese traditions. The same rhetorical figures also recur in Chang’s later writings on politics, art, and cultural change.78 For Chang, the central elements of the Chinese philosophical tradition seem to have constituted the historical core, which he believed should be respected. These elements, he repeatedly underscored, were humanistic traditions that took into consideration the needs and dignity of individuals and their responsibilities toward their fellow human beings. In later writings, Chang also emphasized that the spirit in Chinese philosophy was surprisingly humanistic and “modern” even two thousand years ago.79 (The focus upon the human being was something that Confucian thought shared with “the philosophy of the UN Declaration.”)
Chang’s dissertation received uniformly positive reviews. One reviewer saw it as an ingenious application to China’s situation of the ideas of John Dewey.80 Another reviewer described it as an interesting illustration of how members of a traditional civilization could incorporate an educational program that had been created in a context shaped by quite different social, economic, and philosophical traditions. The issues addressed by Chang in his dissertation, including the school as a forum for fostering democracy and the role of education in social modernization, still have great relevance to Chinese society. (Chang also stressed in the context of his work on the Universal Declaration later on that schools were very important arenas for fulfilling human rights in society.81) Yet the reviewer also emphasized that Chang’s warnings about the dangers of modern industrial society, such as consumerist materialism and the spirit of consumption, needed to be weighed against the ignorance, poverty, and economic inefficiency of traditional society. If China chose the path of modernization, its citizens would have to be prepared for things like individual competition and materialism to become evident in society.82 These observations are thought-provoking insofar as they problematize Chang’s ideas about reconciling modernization from “without” and the traditional forms of Chinese culture.
Peng Chun Chang and John Dewey
Chang’s thesis was strongly inspired by the educator John Dewey (1859–1952). Both men underscored the importance of knowledge, individuality, individual rights and freedoms, and democratic processes when seeking to resolve the common problems of society. These lines of reasoning were to establish a frame of reference for Chang in his later writing of the UN Declaration. Chang shared Dewey’s view that education is the decisive method for achieving constructive societal change. Although Dewey evidently played a major role in Chang’s intellectual development, Chang’s son Stanley recalled that he later in life only seldom spoke about Dewey and his writings. Chang’s friend and former fellow student Hu Shi recalled Chang being clearly surprised at Shi having sufficient peace of mind to listen to a lecture on Dewey’s logic at Columbia’s Philosophical Club in 1937.83 By this Chang seems to have meant that abstract philosophical thinking about logic was hardly an urgent priority at a time when China was experiencing dramatic historic events during its war with Japan. But more broadly, Chang’s political views and philosophy harmonized well with Dewey’s ideas.
Having studied pedagogy as a master’s student at Columbia University, Chang had been naturally drawn to Dewey. Yet Chang seems not to have been personally supervised by Dewey to any significant degree, perhaps largely because Dewey was traveling for much of the time while Chang wrote his dissertation.84 Dewey began a sabbatical at roughly the same time as Chang began his doctoral studies, making several trips overseas, including to China. In his dissertation, Chang makes acknowledgement to Dewey but also to William Heard Kilpatrick, Paul Monroe, and Isaac Kandel from Columbia, who had been involved in supervising him. All were famous educationalists, nationally and internationally.
Paul Monroe had a particular interest in China, which he visited several times during the 1920s and 1930s. He was also active in the China Institute of New York, one of whose purposes was to enable cultural contacts between the United States and China. The institute had ties to the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program, partly through financing and partly through visits to the institute by program scholars. Meng Chih, the institute’s head from 1930 to 1967, was also a Nankai School alumnus and had contacts with Chang’s brother Poling. For his part, Isaac Kandel was well known in the field for his research on comparative international pedagogy. William Heard Kilpatrick (1871–1965) and Helen Parkhurst (1887–1959) were both actively engaged in the pedagogical implementation of Dewey’s more abstract pedagogical-philosophical ideas. They would later become highly influential in American educational debates. Kilpatrick was also an active liberal who went on to move in liberal political circles that included Eleanor Roosevelt, while Parkhurst’s Dalton School was a pioneering institution that sought to find a balance between the individual needs of its pupils and the interests of society.
From the 1920s, debates in China over education were increasingly influenced by the work of John Dewey. Considerable numbers of teachers and school principals in China had read the writings of a thinker who had become a kind of apostle for the new American ideas about educational policy, which had begun to reach countries undergoing radical social transformation. One of the most well-known educators during the period of the Chinese republic was Tao Xingzhi (1891–1946), who had also studied under John Dewey. Tao Xingzhi developed an original pedagogical method for rural teacher education, and he rewrote Dewey’s dictum “Education is not preparation for life, education is life itself” as “Life