Teaching people should start from an early age. Young children are like seedlings. They must be properly cultivated in order to flourish and grow. Otherwise, if the child is injured, even if he does not die young, it will be difficult for him to become a useful person. Therefore, primary education is the foundation of the founding of the country; infant education is especially the foundation. Primary education should be universalized, and so should early childhood education. How to popularize early childhood education is an issue we are most concerned about. In my opinion, there are three steps to popularizing early childhood education.
(1) Change our attitude. Most people's attitude is that children's education is not important; learning one or two years early or one or two years late does not matter much.
We ignore children’s needs, abilities, interests, and emotions. Therefore, they unknowingly ignored their education and entrusted them to old ladies and friends on the street. Under this kind of mentality, kindergartens will not develop. If we want to promote kindergartens, we must fundamentally eliminate this attitude of indifference to children. We must awaken our people to understand that childhood life is the most important life, and childhood education is the most important education.
Parents who care about their children understand the importance of early childhood education and are willing to send their children to kindergarten. But they have an unbreakable prejudice that is also unacceptable. This stereotype is that they do not want their children to associate with children from poor families. They think that their children are good and the children of poor families are bad. They think that when the children of poor families enter kindergarten, they will lead their children into corruption.
Therefore, kindergarten has become a patent for wealthy families and the pseudo-intellectuals. We should know that in the Republic of China, there were only people among people. There was no one who was superior to others, and there was no one who was inferior to others. A man among men must be created from a child within a child. The mission of educators is to use good children to transform bad children. They should not separate good children from bad children, nor should they think that children from rich families are good children and children from poor families are bad children; especially they should not accommodate the opinions of rich families. Exclude children from poor families. If parents from wealthy families and pseudo-intelligentsia do not want their newborn children to be candidates for the overthrow of New China, they should put their own children and children from less fortunate families in a kindergarten to be nurtured. If the teacher who manages the kindergarten does not want to use the kindergarten as a temporary nursery for wealthy ladies to play mahjong, he should dedicate the entire kindergarten to the children of the whole society. But in this case, kindergarten teachers must understand that their mission is not to let it go casually, but to use good children to turn bad children into bad children, and to use the good points of bad children to turn the bad things of good children.
Recognizing the importance of childhood life education is the starting point for popularizing kindergartens; recognizing that kindergartens are educational places for children in the whole society is the starting point for popularizing legitimate kindergartens. We must obtain these two attitudes before kindergarten can have any hope of becoming popular.
(2) Methods of changing kindergartens. Kindergarten methods are expensive. If we don’t try to save money, it will not be easy to popularize. The areas most in need of kindergartens are rural areas and female working areas. Kindergartens in women's working areas can be financed by the factory. Even if the usage fee is too high, it is still easy to raise funds. In rural areas, people are very poor and have no money. It is difficult to popularize elementary schools that cost less, let alone kindergartens that cost twice as much. Therefore, promoting kindergartens in the countryside is like leading a camel through the eye of a needle. We must pursue fundamental reforms in the direction of saving money. Only then can kindergartens have hope of going to the countryside and becoming popular.
(3) Change the system for training teachers. The biggest difficulty in popularizing education is the training of teachers. If we want to popularize early childhood education, we need at least 1.5 million teachers. This is the most difficult problem; not only does it cost a lot of money, but the training is also inappropriate. After being trained to run a kindergarten, you may not necessarily run a kindergarten, or you may run a kindergarten that is not in line with the national conditions, which would be bad. Kindergarten normal schools need to be established, but kindergarten normal schools must be fundamentally transformed in order to train teachers for new kindergartens. Even so, we cannot rely solely on formal infant normal schools to train all teachers. We have now discovered a new approach that makes us optimistic. The Kindergarten Normal School of the Experimental Rural Normal School set up a rural kindergarten in Yanziji, called the Second Central Kindergarten. When it was first opened, it accepted three apprentices and followed the kindergarten teacher Mr. Xu to learn how to run the kindergarten. Mr. Zhang Zonglin served as the guide.
The day before yesterday, he talked to me that the apprenticeship system in kindergartens seemed to be implemented in primary schools, and it could relieve a big problem for rural primary school teachers - loneliness. I said: "This is true. The apprenticeship system can not only relieve the loneliness of life, but also promote the advancement of universal education." The apprenticeship system is indispensable for universal primary education and early childhood education. If we focus on good kindergartens and each one trains two or three apprentices every year, then opening one more kindergarten is equivalent to adding one more place to train teachers. This is the best way. I see three hundred and sixty lines, every line has disciples, and every line is popular. There are carpenters everywhere, how did he get to this point? Apprenticeship. Tailors, plasterers, stonemasons, blacksmiths, and 340,000,000 farmers, which trades are not so popular? To be honest, teaching ecumenism is a perfect apprenticeship. The shortcomings of the apprenticeship system are: hard work but no hard work, the master's unwillingness to fully teach, and the mistreatment of the apprentices. If we can adopt the essence of apprenticeship and eliminate its disadvantages, it will definitely be very effective. If this method is applied to kindergartens, I firmly believe that it will help popularize kindergarten education. Mr. Chen Heqin and I had a very enjoyable conversation recently. He advocated giving Gulou Kindergarten a try. Gulou Kindergarten is the most research-intensive. Now that it has made great plans to recruit apprentices to conduct experiments to promote kindergarten teachers, it couldn't be better.
The three steps for universal early childhood education mentioned above are just what I have seen personally, and there must be many omissions. Comrades who care about the happiness of young children would be grateful if they could provide advice in other good ways.
(Originally published in "Rural Education News", Volume 2, Issue 4, February 29, 1928)