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When he returned to China in 1920, Yan successfully lobbied to become head of the Department of Popular Education, a new autonomous department in Beijing. In 1922, he organized to set up more than 600 schools for popular education in Changsha, capital of Hunan Province. He reduced the Chinese vocabulary of forty thousand characters to the 1,300 most common characters and published four readers, which cost twelve cents total. With this handbook, Yan started the four month-span education with the purpose of getting rid of illiteracy. There were more than 50,000 beneficiary students. Mao Zedong was one of the 100 voluntary teachers at that time. After 1923, Yan continued this activity in Yantai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Jiaxing and etc. in Jun of 1925, as the representative of Chinese folk; Yan participated in |
National Assembly along Pacific Coast in Honolulu, in which he delivered a speech
about popular education. |
In the autumn of 1929, Yan launched a pilot project of popular education in Dingxian (Ting Hsien), in Hebei province. His wife, Alice Huie, was the second daughter of Pastor Huie Kin who graduated with a degree in physical education from Columbia's Teachers College. They had three sons and two daughters. Yan recruited American-trained Chinese graduates to live in Dingxian despite offering small salaries. Yan came to be a teacher in Zhaichengcun Primary School. Alice, an American born Chinese, was quite unfamiliar with the poor life in Dingxian at the beginning, but she supported Yan’s business. She organized family union to introduce health knowledge every week.
The pilot project began in Zhaichengcun, and then became popular in the whole county. In ten years, Yan made great contribution in building popular education schools, setting up credit cooperatives, editing popular magazines, and etc. his work addressed four interlocking problems of village life: poverty, disease, ignorance and misgovernment. When the war broke out with Japan in 1937, Dingxian was lost within a few months. Yan’s Popular Education Association was transferred to Xuchang, Suiping, Wuhan and Changsha. When China's "rice bowl" in Hunan became threatened, the provincial government invited Yan to organize a resistance movement. Finally, it was located in Xiemachang, Chongqing. In 1940, with the help of Zhang Zhi-zhong and Lu Zuo-fu, Yan
set up Rural Reconstruction College. In 1945, it was renamed Private China Rural Reconstruction College, which had four majors, including education, agriculture, water conservancy and society. Famous scholars, such as Sun Fu-guo, Hu Yan-qing and Xiong Fo-xi were invited to be teachers there.
Yan, the principal of Private China Rural Reconstruction College, applied the policy of combining theory and practice. He advocated the spirit of democracy, solidarity, mutual assistance and plain life. He strongly resisted Kuomintang’s request of setting Guidance Teacher. Students were encouraged to organize association, lecture competition, academic discussion and etc. the teachers were encouraged to teach economics, philosophy and other social courses. In the Grand Arrest in 1947, there were 34 teachers catching into jails. Yan tried his best to save those teachers. At that time, the college was claimed as the “pure land of democracy”. |
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