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Every night after finishing his dinner, a boy named Jinrong, who in the summer of 1949 had just completed fourth grade at the Xiaozhuang School near Nanjing, walked to a neighboring village to serve as a "little teacher" [xiao xiansheng]. As a little teacher, he was responsible for teaching illiterate villagers to read using materials provided to him by the school. His "students" included poor children, adults, and even the elderly. As Jinrong explained, "Regardless of whether they are male or female, old or young, all must be taught." Yet while Jinrong shouldered the burden of teaching a village of uneducated farmers to read, he was not quite fully literate himself. The letter in which he recounted his experiences as a little teacher contains several mistaken characters that were corrected by his own (adult) teacher.1
The little teacher system was created by the prominent Chinese educator Tao Xingzhi in January 1934 to promote basic literacy among the vast majority of adults and children who were unable to receive a formal education. Tao defined little teachers broadly as "children who share education with others."2 As it took shape in the mid-1930s, the little teacher "system" required schoolchildren to teach at least two illiterate people for approximately half an hour per day. These could be family members, neighbors, or (as in Jinrong's case) illiterate peasants in nearby villages. Tao Xingzhi had envisioned all 11 million of China's primary school students serving as little teachers, creating a chain of knowledge transmission that would rapidly achieve universal basic literacy by overcoming its main obstacle—a severe shortage of teachers and a lack of time and money to train new ones. While the little teacher system never achieved such scale, it was nevertheless widely implemented and discussed for the better part of two decades.
In many provinces and municipalities, little teacher work was formally incorporated into school curricula. Chinese Communist Party (CCP) educators enthusiastically embraced the little teacher system and continued to implement it during the early years of the People's Republic of China. In the field of education in China today, Tao Xingzhi's little teacher system is still frequently invoked as a model for the development of new pedagogical techniques.3
In this article, I argue...