Winden van verandering in het onderwijs. Shu Xincheng, de transnationale receptie van het Daltonplan en onderwijshervormingen in het vroege republikeinse China, 1919-1925

This dissertation examines how Western progressive educational methods, particularly the Dalton Plan, were received, interpreted, and appropriated in early Republican China (1919-1925) through the biographical lens of educator Shu Xincheng. Rather than treating educational modernization as simple transfer from West to East, the study reveals it as a complex negotiated process shaped by the intersection of global currents, local constraints, and individual agency. The research focuses on Shu Xincheng (1893-1960), a "free-floating literati" who emerged in the wake of China's 1905 abolition of imperial examination system. Born into a peasant family in Hunan, Shu embodied the experience of a generation of Chinese intellectuals who navigated between traditional Chinese schooling and "modern" Western-influenced pedagogical methods. His trajectory from grassroots schoolteacher to nationally recognized educational writer provides a window into how "mid-level" educators served as crucial cultural mediators in China's educational transformation. Using biographical and microhistorical approaches, the dissertation traces three interconnected processes. First, it examines how Shu's educational background at the intersection of traditional Chinese schooling and the Western-influenced graded lecture-en-masse classroom generated both opportunity and ambivalence toward Western progressive methods. Second, it analyzes how China's emerging print culture and institutional networks provided alternative pathways to professional authority for educators outside elite circles. Shu's journal publications, translation work, and editorial roles enabled him to enter national educational discourse and build reform networks. Third, the study follows the complex dynamics of how the Dalton Plan - an American progressive education method emphasizing individualized instruction and student autonomy - circulated, was contested, and ultimately faded in 1920s China. The findings reveal several key insights about transnational educational transfer. Professional networks functioned as dual mechanisms that simultaneously enabled and constrained reform, amplifying certain voices while limiting access to elite platforms. The same infrastructure that facilitated rapid circulation of progressive ideas - journals, civic societies, lectures - also perpetuated rhetorically appealing yet procedurally shallow formulations. It catalyzed conditions for disappointment and eventual disillusionment. Theoretically, the dissertation refines existing frameworks for understanding educational transfer. It demonstrates that Cowen's processes of transfer, translation, and transformation occur simultaneously rather than sequentially, and that transformation can move in multiple directions, often simplifying and diluting imported methods. The study also reveals how Schriewer's concept of "externalization" operated not only among policy elites but also intermediate actors seeking professional recognition, though with greater ambivalence than previously recognized. The research challenges narratives that focus exclusively on elite reformers or top-down policies, instead highlighting how educational modernization was shaped by intermediate actors operating between (trans)national discourse and local implementation. Shu's eventual retreat from classroom practice to historical documentation reflects broader patterns of how unrealized reform promises led reformers themselves to become skeptical of the transformations they once championed. This biographical approach reveals educational modernization as fundamentally contingent - dependent not only on circulated ideas but on personal trajectories, professional networks, and material circumstances of individual educators.