300 Million to Go

Though China was old and wise after 40 centuries of civilization, only 15% of her people knew how to read & write when James Yang Ch'u Yen and his Mass Education Movement went to work. In 24 years Chinese education has been revolutionized. The forces of history and the energy of many scholars had a lot to do with it. So did Jimmy Yen. Last week Jimmy Yen, in the U.S. looking for help to continue the job, reported that China's illiteracy rate has been reduced to 65%.

The idea for the Mass Education Movement came to spare, spindly Jimmy Yen, now 53, when he was thousands of miles from home. A member of China's scholar aristocracy and a graduate of Yale, he went to Europe for the Y.M.C.A. in World War I, was assigned to a labor battalion of 5,000 coolies. Part of his job was to write letters, for no ordinary Chinese could master the stilted literary language (Wen-li). Back in China, scholars like Dr. Hu Shih (later Ambassador to the U.S.) were starting to write in the simpler Pai-hua, or spoken language. Jimmy Yen reduced it to about 1,000 characters, and Basic Chinese was born.

In Peking, Yen gathered a large and loyal group of scholars, then traveled from village to village, setting up "people's schools." The people were eager to learn. "They appreciated tu-shu (reading)," says Yen, "but they never dreamed they could do it, too."

Cabinet ministers visiting Yen's headquarters in the dusty village of Tinghsien found that the people had learned not only to read, but to keep their village clean, grow bigger & better crops. Yen's rule: "While we aim to create a new society, we must not forget we are doing it with an old society."

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek knew that literacy was a military weapon for an army that needed leaders. In 1940, near bombed-out Chungking, the National College for Rural Reconstruction was founded, with Yen as president.

Jimmy Yen's problem today is not only to teach new readers, but to find reading matter for those he has taught. With money from Publisher Marshall Field, he hopes to build up a people's press to provide his millions of "fellow scholars" (graduates of the people's schools) with cheap books in Basic Chinese. His goal: in ten years, only 10% illiteracy in China.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.