Word: mao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...final reckoning of the price paid for Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the damage done to China's educational system may prove the biggest-and longest-lasting-backward leap of all. Closing the schools for a year-so that 110 million students could be freed to "exchange revolutionary experiences," "smash" revisionist leaders and "struggle violently against" teachers suspected of harboring anti-Mao views-will mean the loss of two years of education before the school system is put back in running order. But this may be the least of China's troubles. For behind the scenes...
...tempestuous have the students proved in their earliest reconfinement to the classroom that the present interval is being designated a transitional period of "struggle," preliminary to the full-scale resumption of school in the fall. For the time being, by Mao's edict, all students are expected to engage in factory work, farming and military affairs, and also consume heavy doses of the works of Mao; in those primary and secondary schools that are open, instruction is limited to one to two hours of morning classes, during which pupils read, chant, sing and dance the messages of Chairman Mao...
...educational-reform plan goes into effect, students will be urged to set up the new "revolutionary alliances" that will govern relationships in the future. Professors will no longer have titles but will be called simply "comrade." In fact teachers are supposed not to teach but to share in learning Mao's ideas. Students will also lecture their colleagues, including the teachers, in a new pattern of "mutual teaching and learning...
Hippie-Type Wanderers. Prior to last summer, "our educational system was still something that had not changed its form since the Ch'ing dynasty and had traces of Soviet revisionism in it," declared Chen Pota at a Peking University lecture recently. Now, in line with Mao's doctrine of putting politics in command, the humanities faculties will use Mao's work as textbooks and the class struggle will be the main subject. Mao-think will even apply to the sciences; students are now revising some of the work previously done in mathematics, physics and foreign languages...
Until the new curriculum is put into effect and new textbooks written and printed, Red Chinese education is bound to be chaotic. Already Mao's revolution is producing its own backlash among the youth-a new hippie-type, dropout group that Shanghai newspapers are castigating as "wanderers": "Instead of fighting on the battlefront, they wander around school campuses, parks and streets; they spend their time in swimming pools and playing chess and cards. They take an attitude of nonintervention in the struggle." But Mao's men tend to give such wanderers short shrift. The aim of education...