13 Facts About Kuo Ping-Wen

Kuo Ping-Wen or Guo Bingwen, courtesy name Hongsheng, was an influential Chinese educator.

Kuo Ping-Wen was born in Shanghai, Jiangsu province, and his father was an elder in the Presbyterian Church.

Kuo Ping-Wen attended Lowrie Institute, which was connected with the First Presbyterian Church in Shanghai, graduating in 1896.

At Wooster, Kuo Ping-Wen was one of the editors of the university newspaper, The Wooster Voice, and General Secretary of the Chinese Students Alliance.

Kuo Ping-Wen won several speech prizes for the university and was mentored in oratory by Professor of Speech Delbert Lean.

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Kuo Ping-Wen graduated with honors from the University of Wooster in 1911 and then undertook graduate studies in Education under John Dewey and Paul Monroe at Columbia University, where he received his M A degree in 1912 and his Ph.

Kuo Ping-Wen's doctoral dissertation, The Chinese System of Public Education, was published by the Teachers College at Columbia in 1915 and is a wide-ranging study of the history and structural development of education in China from ancient times onward.

In 1914 Kuo Ping-Wen returned to China where he transformed the Nanjing Higher Normal School into the first modern co-educational Chinese University, National Southeastern University, which was later renamed National Central University in 1928 and Nanjing University in 1949, and his ideas exerted a broad influence in Chinese educational circles.

Kuo Ping-Wen's removal from his presidential post at National Southeastern University in 1925 was a result of the intrusion of political forces into higher education and academia during the turbulent decade of the 1920s in China.

Kuo Ping-Wen was instrumental in the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 and served as the deputy director of the United Nations Relief Rehabilitation Administration.

Scholars from the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China, and the United States were represented, and the participants presented papers dealing with Kuo Ping-Wen's educational thought, his ideas on structuring higher education in China, and his impact on relations between East and West.

Kuo Ping-Wen felt that China could learn much from the study of Western accomplishments in science, just as the West could learn much from China about the philosophy of life, and he was a strong supporter of the expansion of Chinese studies at American colleges and universities.

In furthering interactions between East and West through education, Kuo Ping-wen contributed to building the Sino-American relationship that flourishes today.