Restore and Develop Agricultural Middle Schools (1979)

… Since the downfall of the Gang of Four, the cause of rural education in China has undergone profound change and great development. Yet the enterprise is still seriously inappropriate given the pressing demands of agricultural modernization and the peasantry's actual needs. The key to solving this contradiction is to restore and develop agricultural secondary schools. Agricultural secondary schools are a new type of school combining education and productive labor, created under the conditions of socialism in China by the broad masses of peasants themselves in their struggles against ignorance and backwardness. These schools implement a part-agriculture, part-study system whereby their students acquire book learning while engaging in productive labor—a system that lightens the burden on the state, on the collective, and on the students' families, and is therefore beneficial to the state, the collective, and the individual. Actual practice has demonstrated that doing a proper job of running agricultural secondary schools is an important means for the rural areas to achieve greater, faster, better, and more economical results in producing trained personnel. Our respected and beloved Premier Zhou Enlai pointed out in his "Report on the Work of the Government," delivered at the Third National People's Congress, that "these new type of schools are able to turn out universally developed, new-type people who are both capable of doing physical labor and equipped with culture and technology, and thus create the conditions for gradually eliminating the disparity between mental and manual labor." Hence, the National Work Conference on Education held last year confirmed the guiding principle of developing agricultural secondary schools in the rural areas, and Comrade Deng Xiaoping emphasized in his speech that the proportion of agricultural secondary schools should be increased.