On the Inevitability of the Two-Track Educational System (1979)

… Soon after the founding of the People's Republic, we carried out a step-by-step and judicious reform of the old schools, with emphasis on education serving production and construction, as well as on opening the doors of education to workers and peasants. After 1952, colleges and departments at the tertiary level were reorganized and teaching reformed at all school levels in line with the needs of national construction. After 1957, while summing up the experience and lessons of the First Five-Year Plan and working out a path for China's economic construction, the party's Central Committee and Comrade Mao Zedong, in their concern for the problems of education, proposed a plan for education during the socialist era and conducted a number of reforms of the educational system and structure, as well as experiments to explore new paths for developing education. In September 1958, the party Central Committee and the State Council pointed out in their "Directive Concerning Education Work" that, under the unified objective of cultivating educated working people with socialist awareness, three major categories of schools would exist throughout the country, i.e., full-time schools, part-work/part-study schools, and various types of spare-time schools. The directive emphasized that "rapid universalization of education requires the development of large numbers of spare-time and part-work/part-study schools, since such schools are able to provide all or most of their funding, require little or no assistance from the government, and can obtain teaching staff according to the principle of ‘let those who can, teach.’" In line with this directive, many agricultural secondary schools and part-work/part-study schools were set up throughout the country after 1958. Thus, two educational systems actually emerged in China: the full-time schools, and the part-work/part-study or part-agriculture/part-study schools. The implementation of these two educational systems resulted in greater variety in the types of schools, rapid development of schools at all levels and of all categories, and a new situation in education as a whole.