P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hans Ingvar Roth

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      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 is education.” In the 1920s, Dewey travelled to a range of countries, including Turkey, Mexico, and the Soviet Union and made study trips to China and Japan in 1919–1921, during which he was especially struck by China’s special forms of social community.⁸⁵ Several other leading intellectuals from the West also visited China in this period. One of the most prominent was the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose writings Chang was subsequently to find extremely useful. Russell’s translator during his visit to China in 1920 was Chang’s good friend Y. R. Chao. Chang cited with approval Russell’s assertion that Western civilization’s particular contribution to the world had been the scientific method, while China’s had been insights as to the purpose and value of life.⁸⁶

      Chang’s brother, Poling, had been similarly impressed by Dewey’s ideas when organizing his system of Nankai Schools. Dewey and the educational progressives emphasized the value not only of theoretical studies but also the value of aesthetic and practical attainments and of inculcating democratic thinking. These precepts were to become guiding principles for teaching in the Nankai Schools.⁸⁷

      How exactly was Chang affected by Dewey’s ideas? For Chang, like Dewey, it was important to recreate the circumstances and factors that had resulted in the pioneering spirit and delight in discovery that had been defining features of the “frontier mentality” of American society and the journeys of discovery by previous generations, something we touched upon earlier. These journeys had led to the clear technological, cultural, and material development of “the West.” The purpose of a school was thus not only to create a challenging environment—one that encouraged a combination of thought and action, discipline, and responsibility toward matters of common concern—but also to foster a spirit of eager, critical discovery.

      At the Nankai School, Chang had also introduced a school council with representatives from the school’s sports clubs and musical associations in order to promote democratic participation in the running of the school. Chang shared Dewey’s opinion that it was vital to preserve the valuable elements of the old culture while seeking to implement new and creative curricular reforms. In this Chang parted company with several members of the New Culture Movement, who wanted more radical changes in Chinese customs, language, and habits of thought.⁸⁸ Chang seems to have been unwilling to tone down the Confucian legacy, which was to become increasingly pronounced for him with the passage of time. In the 1920s, China’s growing economy led to the emergence of major urban centers, such as Shanghai, whose increasingly Westernized cultures were being criticized by intellectuals, Chang among them, for being materialistic and fashion-obsessed.⁸⁹

      There are other striking similarities between John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and Chang’s anti-metaphysical view of human rights: both emphasized the importance of finding agreement on practical ethical questions and of not becoming embroiled in abstract philosophical considerations that lacked practical relevance.⁹⁰ Ideals and precepts must be “lived” by the students in order for them to gain knowledge.

      Chang and Dewey also shared the view that Communism represented a too-hurried and too-radical strategy for societal transformation. The path to modernization of China should instead be gradual and focused upon educational means.⁹¹ There is, then, a direct line from Chang’s doctoral dissertation to his activities as an author of the UN Declaration. Chang’s dissertation makes clear that he had thought deeply about the rights and freedoms of the individual, a theme to which he would return several times in his later writings. Several of the issues on which Chang focused in his dissertation—the importance of a basic education for all, the value of consuming and producing culture, respect for the individual’s particular needs and conditions—would once again come to the fore in his work on the UN Declaration. Chang also shared Dewey’s and Kilpatrick’s rejection of authoritarianism in schools (as well as their rejection of political theories of authoritarianism). Even though Dewey did not talk much in terms of human rights he was a strong supporter of academic freedom and free speech.⁹² Dewey as well as Chang was also eager to emphasize community values. In other words, Dewey did not accept a “self-centered individualism” but endorsed instead a “social liberalism.”⁹³

      Both Chang and Dewey were profoundly influenced by the dramatic societal changes that their respective countries were undergoing. Dewey grew up in a nineteenth-century agricultural society that by the turn of the last century had rapidly transformed into an increasingly urbanized industrial society. While not experiencing the same rapid pace of change as the United States, China in the first decades of the twentieth century was nonetheless characterized by increasingly rapid industrialization and urbanization. According to Chang, China was also СКАЧАТЬ