The “Great Leap Forward” launched by Mao Zedong in 1958 was all-rounded, and education was also affected, and there was a Great Leap Forward in education, which was called the “education revolution” at that time, and this revolution was also a preview of the education revolution of the Cultural Revolution that followed. This revolution was also a preview of the educational revolution of the Cultural Revolution that followed. The book “Rethinking the “Educational Revolution” in the Great Leap Forward” written by mainland scholar Wei Manhua has a more in-depth study on this subject, and some of the contents of this article are also referred to.
The Great Leap Forward in Education: Running Schools for All People
In March 1958, the Ministry of Education of the Communist Party of China (CPC) held the Fourth Administrative Conference on Education. According to the Chronicle of Educational Events (1949-1982), “the purpose of the conference was to oppose conservative ideas and promote the Great Leap Forward in education”, and “in order to ensure the Great Leap Forward in education ……, we must first break the old ideas …… break all kinds of conservative ideas and free ourselves from the shackles of mere business views, ‘authoritative doctrines’, international standards, etc.!”
In September of the same year, Liu Shaoqi said in Henan: “A new approach should be taken to run factories and education. A new factory can also run a school, recruit a group of secondary school students, here classes, a factory is a university, a few hours a day to read books, do a few hours of work, the factory is the school, the school is the factory. In the future, they will come out as both university graduates and skilled workers, which is also a condition for the transition to communism.”
A concrete manifestation under the guidance of such an idea was to run a school for all people, i.e. by mobilizing the masses to run a big education. Henan Province was the vanguard of the Great Leap Forward and the birthplace of the People’s Commune, and the Great Leap Forward in education also rushed ahead. With the encouragement of departments at all levels and the media, first Changge County proposed to popularize primary and junior high schools within one year, followed by some areas where primary and secondary education was popularized in three months or even less, one after another at a faster pace.
For example, in “People’s Education”, No. 4, 1958, “Placebo popularized junior high school and primary education in 7 days in Baipo Township, Baipo County”, it is recorded that: in 7 days, Baipo Township set up 25 private elementary school with 1,025 students enrolled and 3 amateur middle schools with 231 students. The school was built quickly and economically, “not building a house, not making a table …… start-up costs also to the most frugal point. Xipo Li village only spent 12 cents to buy a box of chalk to open the school. The whole township …… spent a total of 3 yuan and 50 cents”.
Baipo Township’s experience in running a school was soon publicized in Henan, and even across the country, and many places have learned from it, saying that “by satellite, across the rocket”, to “the speed of lightning”, “the speed of light”. In half a month or 10 days to universalize primary and secondary education and eradicate illiteracy.
For example, in Chengguan Town, Fangcheng County, Henan Province, with a total population of 11,000, nine specialized schools were built within a few months, including a comprehensive red college, health, drama and music, dance, and teacher training.
The editorial of People’s Education of that year even gave astonishing figures: “In just two months’ time, according to incomplete statistics from 19 provinces, 55,361 private secondary schools and various private vocational secondary schools had been founded, with more than 2.68 million students enrolled.”
At the same time, factories and enterprises also set up schools, and some factories and people’s communes even announced that they had set up a “communist education system” from kindergartens to higher schools. It was also during this period that all rural primary and secondary schools were decentralized to the leadership of rural people’s communes, and later, all private elementary school and agricultural high schools run by brigades were managed by production brigades. Rural education was excluded from the input of the Communist government, and it was called “people’s education run by the people”. Since then, rural education, lacking government input, has been in decline.
The Great Leap Forward in Education for Higher Education
In September 1958, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) issued the Instruction on Education Work, stating that “within three to five years, the country should basically complete the eradication of illiteracy and universalization of primary education. …… should vigorously develop secondary education and higher education, and strive to achieve, within fifteen years or so, basically the goal of making the nation’s youth and adults, who are able and willing, to receive higher education, and then to engage in raising it in about fifteen years.”
Fifteen years of universal higher education can only be described as madness. Then the “Great Leap Forward” in higher education began. Some schools set up branch schools or independent schools with some specialties; some relied on scientific research farms to run colleges and universities; some secondary schools were upgraded to colleges and universities; some counties also set up red colleges and universities, and even factories, people’s communes and institutions also set up higher schools, secondary specialized schools, red colleges and universities of labor. The quality of teaching in these new schools can be imagined.
On October 1, Guangming Daily reported: “China’s education industry has gained huge development at an unprecedented speed. …… More than 800 new schools of higher education have been established this year. More than 1,000 higher education schools and more than two-thirds more students than in 1957. …… Many provinces have initially built their own higher education system including comprehensive universities and higher education schools of engineering, agriculture, medicine and teacher training, etc. Many provinces have decided to popularize higher education within 15 years.”
On the same day, the newspaper published an editorial entitled “All people will go to school and accelerate the construction of socialism” and said that “the time has come when we will appear in the world with a high culture”.
In February 2011, Yanhuang Chunqiu published an article by 98-year-old Mr. Liu Xuyi, “Experiencing the Educational Revolution in Hubei during the Great Leap Forward,” in which he recorded that Wang Renzhong, then secretary of the provincial party committee of Hubei Province, proposed the goal of “running comprehensive universities in all counties”; on the issue of the school system, he advocated a multi-track system; on the issue of formulating syllabuses and teaching materials, he advocated a multi-track system. On the issue of the academic system, he advocated a multi-track system; on the issue of developing syllabi and teaching materials, he advocated that teachers and students should work together to develop syllabi and teaching materials under the leadership of the CPC. The results of this were predictable.
Kang Sheng instructed that the evaluation of professors was based on the amount of output
From July to October 1958, the notorious Kang Sheng, in his capacity as deputy head of the Cultural and Educational Group of the CPC Central Committee, visited some schools in Beijing and Henan Province to inspect the progress of the “educational revolution. At Beijing Normal University, he said: “The university has two major tasks: to run a big school and to run a big factory. Each class can run a factory. In 1958, at least 100 such schools, which were also industrial and academic, should be set up. As to whether there are conditions to do, he did not care. Since agricultural production can be “as bold as a man can be, the land has a large yield”, running schools can also be “as bold as a man can be, how much can be done”?
On the evaluation of professors, Kang Sheng also has a strange theory. When he inspected Beijing Agricultural University, he clearly instructed: the school should hang at least five plates: school, factory, farm, research institute, agricultural bureau. If you can hang more than a dozen plates, it would be better. Professors to be rated according to the yield of the crops grown, mu yield of 1,000 pounds can only be five professor, 2,000 pounds of the fourth level, 3,000 pounds of the third level, 4,000 pounds of the second level, 5,000 pounds of the first level. Such selection criteria are strange in both ancient and modern times, and it is estimated that only an authoritarian regime such as the Chinese Communist Party can come up with it.
The Great Leap Forward in education replaced teaching with labor
During the Great Leap Forward, Marx’s thesis of “combining education with productive labor” was treated as dogma, and the CCP strongly advocated a revolution in teaching methods, i.e., increasing labor time and replacing teaching with labor. In the cities, the labor of primary and secondary school students was carpentry, electrician’s winding, welding, sewing, laundry, etc. In the countryside, it was growing food, vegetables, fish, fertilizing, hoeing, raising animals, and turning the land. Some of the labor in universities is related to professions, such as labor in engineering colleges and agricultural colleges, such as manufacturing cars, tractors, machine tools, weaving, planting experimental fields, etc. During this period, teachers and students from urban secondary schools and above went to the mountains and countryside in batches for “labor training”, eating, living and working with workers and farmers. Many teachers and students also participated in the great steel-making activities.
According to incomplete statistics from 20 provinces, cities and autonomous regions, by October 1958, there were 7,240 factories in 397 institutions of higher learning, 144,000 factories in more than 13,000 secondary schools and colleges, and more than 86,000 small iron and steel making furnaces in 22,100 schools. In this way, students and teachers in some places became mere laborers, and the original syllabus and teaching plan were set aside, replacing learning with production, which seriously impacted the normal teaching order.”
The Great Leap Forward in Education: Mobilizing the Masses to Compile Teaching Materials
According to the “Instruction on Education Work” of the CPC in 1958, “the teaching materials of higher schools should be revised seriously under the leadership of the Party Committee by adopting the method of combining the Party Committee, teachers and students, and after a loud noise and debate.”
Under such instructions, new textbooks and lecture notes were produced everywhere. University textbooks for various subjects could be compiled in ten days or a few months, at an astonishing speed. For example, the entire faculty and students of Beijing Normal University, which had set up 256 teaching reform groups, produced 169 new syllabi after half a month’s struggle. Sixteen fourth-year French students at Nanjing University compiled a French Conversation textbook in four days. Third-year Chinese students at Peking University compiled “History of Chinese Literature”. Students and young teachers from six departments of Tsinghua University, including mechanical, electrical, civil, water conservancy, architecture, and power, compiled a total of 95 kinds of textbooks, teaching and research reference materials, etc. ……
This is true for higher education textbooks, and also for primary and secondary school textbooks. For example, in Henan Province, “it took only five months to compile a complete set of teaching plans, syllabus and teaching materials for higher, secondary and primary agricultural and forestry schools”.
Conclusion
In addition to the above-mentioned “great leaps forward” in education, there were also leaps forward in school system reform. The “flourishing” of higher education schools created by these “Great Leap Forward” was just an illusion. It can be said that it is a prelude to the complete destruction of education by the Cultural Revolution. No one denies that all this is caused by the Chinese Communist Party, which has never stopped destroying education, and the consequences of another “Great Leap Forward” of colleges and universities started in the late 1990s are already visible today.
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