A Network for Popularizing Socialist Education

In Nanan hsien, schools are run in front of the doors of the poor and lower-middle peasants, in the remote mountain areas, and on the off-shore islands, as demanded by the poor and lower-middle peasants. This has changed the former irrational distribution of schools. Besides, sparetime schools and political evening schools of various types have been set up throughout this hsien by such means as are appropriate to the local conditions. In this way, popular education for school-age children and teenagers is basically achieved and 80 percent of the adult commune members can also take part in the study. Experience of this hsien shows that it is entirely possible to popularize socialist education so long as we conscientiously carry out Chairman Mao's "May 7 Directive" and fully arouse the masses.     

Wholeheartedly Complete "Reeducation" Work

How is it that the brilliant directive of our great leader, Chairman Mao, that "intellectual youths be sent down to the countryside to receive reeducation from the poor and lower-middle peasants" has been realized completely throughout an entire hsien? The experience of Ch'ang-ling hsien in Kirin Province was that the leadership personally took a hand in relying on the poor and lower-middle peasants, in wholeheartedly doing the work, and in applying Mao Tsetung thought to the elevation of the level of reeducation.     

As the Party Nurtured Me,so Will I Nurture the Educated Youths

Encouraged by the admonition of our great leader Chairman Mao that "educated youths must go to the villages to be reeducated by the poor and lower-middle peasants.… Comrades in villages everywhere should welcome their going," we at Nansa Brigade in I-ch'eng hsien, Shansi, welcomed twenty-three educated youths who came to the countryside from Peking in December 1968.     

The False Intelligentsia (1927)

Since the beginning of May 1974, our hsien, led by the higher Party committee, has initiated, on a trial basis, spare-time correspondence education for educated youths who have resettled in the countryside. The institutes of higher education in Shanghai provide us with teaching materials. Aside from this, our hsien has undertaken full responsibility for organization and tutoring. In connection with the needs of the Three Great Revolutionary Movements in our hsien, five subjects were initiated for the first term of correspondence education: "Selected Readings from the Classics of Marxism-Leninism," "History," "Writing," "Breeding of Fine Strains of Paddy Rice," and "Agricultural Meteorology." We have engaged 23 part-time teachers and enrolled 30 students for each subject, totaling 150. The students are organized according to subject into 30 study groups. These groups are distributed over nine communes and state farms where the resettled educated youths are relatively concentrated.     

Discussing Expository Teaching For Primary School Students in the Lower Grades

In order to implement better Chairman Mao's directive to "Study conscientiously; become expert in Marxism," the Party committee of Hunan Province last year established classes for theory cadres in all "May 7" cadre schools run by the Hunan Province revolutionary committee. Since April of last year, three courses of study have been conducted, and the cadre schools connected with mines and factories on the local, municipal, hsien, and provincial level have altogether trained more than 620 tutors for the study of the works of Marx and Lenin.     

Strongly Popularize Pastoral-Area Primary School Education

Located at the source of the Yellow River and bordering on Lake Cha-ling, Ma-to hsien in the Kuo-lo Tibetan Autonomous District of Tsinghai Province is purely an animal husbandry area where the terrain is high and cold, the weather is very changeable, and the conditions are miserable. The entire hsien has 6 animal husbandry communes and 34 production brigades. Here, at an average altitude of more than 4,200 meters above sea level and on spacious grasslands totaling 25,000 square kilometers, live more than 4,500 Tibetan shepherds.     

Hung-Ch'i Brigade is Concerned About all Aspects of the Growth of Educated Youths who have Gone to the Countryside

Hung-ch'i Brigade of P'ing-kang Commune in Huo-chin hsien, Anhwei, is an advanced unit for doing good work with educated youths in the countryside. This brigade, since 1969, has welcomed fifty-three educated youths to the countryside. In more than four years since then these educated youths, under the tutelage of the Party organizations and the poor and lower-middle peasants, have been tempered in the Three Great Revolutionary Movements of the villages. They have become good aides when the cadres and masses read and study, daring little generals in class struggle, attackers in the production struggle, and red vanguard soldiers in scientific experimentation. In the process of mutually uniting with the poor and lower-middle peasants, their thinking and their emotions have deeply changed: those who in the past did not want to go to the villages now love the villages; those who in the past did not have deep feelings concerning the poor and lower-middle peasants now feel that the poor and lower-middle peasants are very close. The cadres and masses of Hung-ch'i Brigade educated the educated youths, but they also learned many things from the young people; they especially learned that the young people are vigorous and enthusiastic, are the most willing to learn, have the least conservative thinking, have a revolutionary spirit of daring to think and daring to do, enabling the cadres and masses to make very great progress. The cadres and masses of Hung-ch'i Brigade, whenever speaking of the educated youths, become exceedingly excited, praising ceaselessly.     

This Commune has Carried Out the Popularization of Education

Chu-hsing Commune in Chin-shan hsien is located in a distant suburb of Shanghai. Before liberation, this was an out-of-the-way locality where culture and education were unusually backward. After liberation, although several primary schools were set up, there were still over 1,700 children of poor and lower-middle peasants in the whole commune to whom schooling was not made available because of the influence of the revisionist line in education. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution caused profound changes in the appearance of this commune. Under the guidance of chairman Mao's proletarian education line, the 18 production brigades in the whole commune all have schools, and every team is setting up primary school auxiliary junior middle school classes. All children of school age and young adults have entered school, popularizing the eight-year system of education.     

Bring the Agricultural University Down to The Countryside

In accordance with Chairman Mao's teaching that "there must be a revolution in education" and under the impetus of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, at the end of 1971, our institute ran the south Shensi teaching base in an old temple in Lung-kang-ssu, Nan-cheng hsien, setting up the field of specialization in agricultural crops. In the spring of 1972, we started taking in worker-peasant-soldier students from the various hsien of south Shensi. For the last two years, with the Party's basic line as a platform, the base's Party organization has plunged into launching the rectification movement to criticize Lin Piao, angrily criticizing the revisionist line in education being pushed by Liu Shao-ch'i and Lin Piao. Recently, it has also angrily criticized their advocacy of the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius and their criminal acts of promoting restoration and turning back the wheel of history. Thus, it has pushed the revolution in education to unceasing and intensive development. Under the enlightenment of Chairman Mao's "May 7 Directive," the base's revolutionary teachers and students have struggled to make education serve proletarian politics. In coordination with production labor and the Three Great Revolutionary Movements, they have taken a joyful first step on the road to bringing the agricultural university down to the villages.     

Strengthen the Leadership of the Party,Seriously Work for the Successful Enrollment of Students in Universities

In accordance with Chairman Mao's teaching, "It is imperative to select students from among workers and peasants with practical experience," in work to enroll students for universities in the autumn of 1971, our hsien relied on the broad masses of workers and peasants and firmly adhered to the principle of "registration on a voluntary basis, recommendation by the masses, approval by the leadership, and review by the school," thus satisfactorily accomplishing the task and basically giving satisfaction to the applicants, the masses, the leadership, and the schools. All were unanimously of the opinion that this student recruitment campaign had propagated and carried out to the letter Chairman Mao's revolutionary line in education, firmly adhered to the mass line, and embodied the class line of the Party.     

Four New Kinds of Schools

Following Chairman Mao's great strategic policy and great directive for the educational revolution to "prepare for war, prepare for natural calamities, and serve the people," all the hsien (shih) of Kwangtung Province, during the high tide of socialist revolution and socialist construction, exhibited a revolutionary spirit of self-reliance; they established 298 short-term industrial, agricultural, health, and normal schools, which break down into 59 industrial schools, 60 agricultural schools, 72 health schools, and 107 normal schools. More than 26,000 students were selected from among workers with practical experience, poor and lower-middle peasants, and teachers in active service.     

Effects of Self-Regulated Strategy Development for POW+TREE on High School Students with Learning Disabilities

High school students with learning disabilities often have difficulty expressing their thoughts in writing. At the secondary level, writing becomes paramount to successfully navigating the curriculum and expressing knowledge. In this study, the effectiveness of Self-Regulated Strategy Development for POW (Pick my idea, Organize my notes, Write and say more) + TREE (Topic sentence, Reasons—three or more, Examine, Ending) for persuasive quick writes with four high school students with learning disabilities was investigated. Results indicated an increase in the number of response parts written and increased stability in the number of words written. The participants who deemed the intervention as positive provided social validity.     

Editor's Introduction

The documents in this issue of Chinese Education were published in China in 1979 and 1980. They appeared originally in Renmin jiaoyu (People's Education), Hongqi (Red Flag), and Guangming Daily, and cover a variety of topics.     

Pedagogical and Didactic Aspects of the New Hauptschule

Northrhine-Westphalia, with 17 million people the largest of the eleven Länder (states) of the Federal Republic of Germany, issued revised curriculum programs for all its schools between 1966 and 1968. The most interesting changes occurred in the secondary school for those children (about 60% of the age group) whose parents do not enroll them at age 10 in a Realschule (semiacademic) or a Gymnasium (academic). These children formerly remained in the Volksschule for a total of eight years; but now the upper half of this school, expanded by one year, is called Hauptschule and is designed to offer more substantial education than previously, including a foreign language (English). The same pattern is followed in all the other West German Länder.     

Creatively Study and Apply Mao Tse-Tung Thought and Conscientiously Transform Your World Outlook

In response to Chairman Mao's great call to "send the masses of cadres to do manual labor," we of Sung-hu Company have settled down to do manual labor in Sung-hu Commune of Hsin-chien hsien for a year. It has been a year for "renewing study" through labor tempering. It is also a year which witnessed our creative study and application of Mao Tse-tung Thought, our drive to combat and repudiate revisionism, and our continuous progress in improving ourselves.     

The Vast Universe Raises a New Man

In October 1968, fourteen intellectual youths of the Te-hsing Middle School in Te-hsing hsien actively responded to the summons of the great leader, Chairman Mao, and - under the guidance of the cadres transferred to lower levels, the teachers transferred to lower levels, and the medical personnel transferred to lower levels - arrived with great enthusiasm at the Lung-t'ou Mountain Commune, Lung-t'ou Brigade, Ch'a-tui Village, in the Huai-yü Mountains region.     

Exploration,Innovation, Participation,and Practice : A Preliminary Probe of High School Environmental Education

This bibliography is intended to serve as an aid to those pursuing the study of Mao Tse-tung, Maoism, and education in China. Efforts have been centered on recent materials in European languages, primarily English, not covered in other available bibliographic works, some of which are listed in Section I: Bibliographies and Reference Works. Excluded from the present list are the many translations of primary Chinese materials to be found in periodicals such as Current Background (Hong Kong), Issues &; Studies (Taiwan), Peking Review (Peking), and Chinese Education (USA).     

School and Society,July 1, 1979, to June 30, 1980

The Elementary School [Folkeskole]

In the past year, the folkeskole has been better material for the media than any time in the past, and its circumstances, its tasks, its content, and its results have been commented upon and discussed in both the national and the local press. In the school year 1979-1980, there were 740,000 pupils enrolled in these schools, including kindergarten classes (Jyllandsposten 4/19). The number of children is decreasing as reported by central authorities from the Minister of Education, for example, in Politiken, 1/16, which at the same time reports that the development of the school has therefore become difficult to control, as many municipalities have reported, e.g., Frederikshavn Avis 3/13.     

The Beginnings of Curricular Reform: The Reports "Fifteen to Eighteen" and "Half our Future"

Late in 1959, the Ministry of Education published a report on the situation of youth between the ages of 15 and 18. (89) The focus of the study, also known as the Crowther Report after the chairman of the committee authoring it (90), was the age group that was past the compulsory school age, a large segment of which was already gainfully employed with no further contact with formal education. The report, which contained important reform proposals on the organizational and curricular restructuring of the secondary school system, focused upon the following task, spelled out by the minister: "to consider the education of boys and girls between ages 15 and 18 in relation to the changing social and industrial needs of our society and the needs of its individual citizens, and in particular to consider the balance between these ages at various levels of general and specialized studies and to examine the interrelationship of the various stages of education." (91)     

Erratum

On page 12 of Chinese Education, XI:2-3 (Summer-Fall 1978), it is incorrectly stated that the University of Chicago lends its Renmin jiaoyu holdings. While it will not do that, the Far Eastern Library of the University of Chicago will furnish photocopies or microfilms of the JMJY holdings on request.