The Reversal of Education, Essay Example

The Cultural Revolution in China was the personification of Mao Zedong’s offensive against tradition, transforming Chinese society into one that was tirelessly revolutionizing. As a part of this emphasis on the uprising in the mid-1960s and 70s, the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, dissolved trust within families, turned students against their teachers, and forcibly separated people from their individual beliefs. One of the original purposes of education is to unify communities – immersing people in the experiences of others and aiding in the exploration of their mind and values so they can determine the best way to fulfill their role in the community. Mao Zedong and the CCP exploited the education of China’s youth in their pursuit of revolution, transforming curriculum, student body, and the role of students and teachers in the process. Achieving Mao’s goal of a Socialist society required a sense of singularity. Through the CCP’s use of education reforms, the pursuit of economic equality for all citizens created a deep division personally.

Education Reforms

Under Mao’s rule in 1966, the length of primary school and college education was trimmed by one year, and six months, respectively.[1] Mao instituted an effort to educate specifically those who were impoverished and living in rural areas, rather than the children of China’s wealthy elite. The blatant transformation of education included changing administrative hands from bourgeois intellectuals to committees of local workers and soldiers. This shifted the focus of the material to proletarian politics, production, and practicality. “The proletarian standards of education were applied in measuring the reforms, and they had to be politically conscious“². To purge the Four Olds –ideas, customs, culture and habits considered out-dated, the Chinese classroom now rejected values central to a child’s ability to learn. The Chinese government sacrificed collaboration, diligence, and respect for elders in favor of eradication of the elite.[2] The reforms put teachers in the exhausting position of being criticized and attacked by students while simultaneously being held responsible for their success. Innocent educators and intellectuals were subjected to humiliation and even execution, while the knowledge they worked to obtain was withheld from students who needed it. [3] According to Yonguing et al., “Following the Cultural Revolution that took place in 1966, the vast of the majority of intellectuals became an object of persecution, and the education system was to a large extent destroyed. As a result, the public had bad opinions about those who had acquired high levels of education. This point portrays how bad the cultural revolutions were and to the extent at which they affected the education systems”. On the other hand, according to Wang, “one of the most affected areas was the Chinese education systems. Although many rural schools continued to function throughout this period, formal education virtually ceased in urban areas. The educational systems were to be intensified to raise the political consciousness of the students.” Mao revealed that “the most important goal of the educational reforms was to mobilize the students and raise to a higher level their awareness of the class contradictions still existing in Chinese society.”⁴

Like Mao Zedong’s efforts during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, the Cultural Revolution advocated so fervently for productivity that it sacrificed quality. The education reforms such as eliminating entrance exams and being more inclusive of soldiers and peasants made education more accessible, but also denigrated its value.[4] The time students spent in school was also decreased. Mao thought students would learn more from working than reading and class discussion. In the classroom, he dictated that teachers at each grade level should shift the focus to physical labor and practicality, orienting classroom study towards social, political, and production needs.[5]

On the surface, leveling the playing field academically was a part of the Chinese Communist Party’s motive to diffuse the limitations of socio-economic classes and create a collaborative nation. Genuinely, though, reforms to the education system were one aspect of a goal to tear down the wealthy citizens’ abundance of privilege that the party found so threatening. Instead of solidifying unity within Chinese society for the Socialism goal of productivity, the reforms repelled one class from another and one person from another.

Socialism ideals unity and Irish

Mao strived for Socialist ideals that promoted a classless society, one where the distribution of goods was kept entirely under government control, and all citizens received similar benefits.[6] According to Cheng “Jose Martí, the nineteenth-century father of Cuban nationalism, speci?cally condemned the separation of work from the study in modem education as “a monstrous crime” and “an error of the utmost gravity.” He suggested that in the future every school should operate an “agricultural station” in which the students would be able to not only describe but handle a plough.

It was severed and separation

In the nineteenth century, education in the West and East was similar to that of many third world countries. Later on, there was a separation of the schools from the society and education from work whereby it neglected practical skills while it upheld the education for the elites and urban orientation. Besides, there was division in labor whereby the mental and physical labor were separated as well as the countryside and the city and commoners and the elites. According to Cheng,” … The separation between mental and manual work would disappear. The Russian populists were even more hostile to institutionalized education. For them, it only served the upper classes and was indifferent to the needs of the masses and thus became one of the main factors causing and maintaining social inequalities.”

Students Influenced by the government

Through instituting reforms in the education system, the CCP changed the hierarchy of influence in China. Traditionally, young people are influenced by teachers and family members as well as their values in determining right and wrong. Instead, the Cultural Revolution established an environment where the government held the power of influence, cultivating loyalty through fear of punishment. A Chinese student may not have been able to trust their family, and parents or siblings could not freely pass on values. Teachers weren’t allowed to teach what they knew either and were held to a specifically production-based curriculum; students did not have the freedom to express their own beliefs if they included any semblance of the Four Olds or the black elements, for example.

To supplement the curriculum alterations, the CCP attempted to manipulate students’ values was through the sent-down youth movement. The program marks the pinnacle of these reforms. The program focused on agricultural production and the return to an idealized rustic lifestyle. Students in the movement were encouraged to practice civic duties and behave following CCP principles. Emphasis on technical skills was promoted within the ranks, and there was an overall shift in the nation’s consciousness to focus on industrializing and competing with other western powers on a national level. During this period, teachers were struggled by their students, and it separated them. Their actions show the devotion the youth had for Mao, and their getting carried away in the violence, which Mao eventually crushed with the Sent-Down Youth Movement, show that Mao had indeed created an atmosphere of revolution.

Through encouraging the people of China to struggle intellectuals and elites, Mao turned young students against their teachers. By emphasizing Red Guard enthusiasm, the CCP aimed to transform these children, the beneficiaries of knowledge, into assailants against it. In the Eleventh Plenum of The Eighth Central Committee, Mao said

Red guards criticized and struggled teachers

The red guards comprised of the most active and bravest and most founded in the revolutionary students who pack the reviewing strands on both flanks which were scattered about the square. Some of the Red Guards appeared to defend the party leaders being criticized by the Peking racial Red Guards[7]. According to Heaslet, “Attempts made by China scholars during the peak of the Cultural Revolution to analyze Red Guard developments and single out provincial patterns proved extremely futile. Reporting which poured in seemed to indicate that each province was operating independently from the rest. Besieged provincial leaders appeared to deal with Red Guard developments on an ad hoc basis. For their part, Red Guard factions in each area seemed to devise programs and policies irrespective of any directions from above.” Also, there was violent persecution during China’s revolution, whereby the Red Guards who were a group of students attacked their teachers for being capitalists[8]. According to Wang, “In the summer of 1966, in all ninety-six schools1 covered by this research, students physically attacked teachers. A total of twenty-seven educators were identified as being beaten to death by students. In other cases, teachers were seriously injured, and some committed suicide after suffering humiliation and torture. Besides, at two of these schools, two students were beaten to death by their classmates. Shortly after the rise of campus violence, even people off campus were murdered by students as well.”

Teachers were barred from sharing their knowledge because of the streamlined curriculum.

The education reforms implemented brought about a change in the curriculum of education and new curriculums were developed to enhance teaching. These reforms were designed as a result of the imbalance that was present in the existing curriculum and to address the problems that were present in those systems. With this new curriculum, the teachers were not allowed to share their knowledge with the students, and there was a need to produce some specialists who were highly specialized and more equipped. This was driven by the need to improve the quality of education and ensure that the training available was sufficient. The reforms brought about a link between performance and students career According to a member of a gang said; “we’d rather read a couple of books less than allow the bourgeoisie to influence our younger generation.”⁷ This portrays the reason why the teachers were stopped from passing knowledge,

A tenet of Socialism is the absence of personal property. It relates to the belief that the students were made to have regarding their teachers as a result of the new education curriculum. Students were separated from their own beliefs. The students could no longer rely on what the teachers taught as they were returned against the teachers by Mao.

Conclusion

By carrying out the Cultural Revolution, the CCP accomplished the destruction of tradition that Mao envisioned, in part, through repurposing education in the country. Impoverished young people living in the countryside were afforded access to schooling, but the mutation of education in China severed the bridges it is originally meant to create. Instead of utilizing education for its traditional purpose of unifying, in the late 1960s, the CCP exploited it for division so the government could have control.

• The reformation of China’s education system during the Cultural Revolution affected the country perpetually, but its impact could also be seen immediately.
• The Cultural Revolution in China was put in place to pulverize values and ideas that the government deemed antiquated.

Bibliography

Cheng, Yinghong, and Patrick Manning. “Revolution in education: China and Cuba in global context, 1957-76.” Journal of World History (2003): 359-391.

Heaslet, Juliana Pennington. “The red guards: instruments of destruction in the Cultural Revolution.” Asian Survey 12, no. 12 (1972): 1032-1047.

Nirmal Kumar Chandra. “Education in China: From the Cultural Revolution to Four Modernisations.” Economic and Political Weekly 22, no. 19/21 (1987): AN121-N136. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4377015

Wang, Robert S. “Educational Reforms and the Cultural Revolution: The Chinese Evaluation Process.” Asian Survey15, no. 9 (1975): 758-774.

Yongqing Donga, Renfu Luoc, Linxiu Zhang, Chengfang Liuc, Yunli Baie Intergenerational transmission of education: The case of rural China Review (2019) 311-323

Wang, Youqin. “Student attacks against teachers: The revolution of 1966.” Issues and Studies-English Edition– 37, no. 2 (2001): 29-79.

[1] Nirmal Kumar Chandra. “Education in China: From the Cultural Revolution to Four Modernisations.” Economic and Political Weekly 22, no. 19/21 (1987): AN121-N136. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4377015

[2] Wang, Robert S. “Educational Reforms and the Cultural Revolution: The Chinese Evaluation Process.” Asian Survey15, no. 9 (1975): 758-774.

[3] Yongqing Donga, Renfu Luoc, Linxiu Zhang, Chengfang Liu, Yunli Baie Intergenerational transmission of education: The case of rural China Review (2019) 311-323

[4] Ibid²

[5] Ibid¹

[6] Cheng, Yinghong, and Patrick Manning. “Revolution in education: China and Cuba in a global context, 1957-76.” Journal of World History (2003): 359-391.

[7] Heaslet, Juliana Pennington. “The red guards: instruments of destruction in the Cultural Revolution.” Asian Survey 12, no. 12 (1972): 1032-1047.

[8] Wang, Youqin. “Student attacks against teachers: The revolution of 1966.” ISSUES AND STUDIES-ENGLISH EDITION- 37, no. 2 (2001): 29-79