Ccp Education

...

strive to industrialise China and create a powerful workforce within China. Approximately 30,000 school children could not attend primary education as they had been required to work on backyard furnaces. This ultimately resulted in fewer peasants having access to primary education and those who did attend, had only been taught basic reading and maths as part of Mao’s ‘half work half study’ initiative. A new ‘Two track’ education system had developed which saw rural children advance from primary school to agricultural middle schools. This meant that those rural children were unable to enter traditional higher education and therefore put at a disadvantage when compared to the urban children. As a result, it was now urban areas that had the best access to both primary and higher education as now, universities were only available in cities. What’s more, admission to these universities was based on political and class background, meaning that once more the urban elite came to dominate education. Similarly, teachers now gained their positions through political qualifications rather than academic credentials which had meant that teaching standards were of increasingly poorer quality. This strive to industrialise China had resulted in the creation of an elite school system wherein peasants now had little access to education and instead, were made to carry out manual tasks in the fields, thus making the GLF a failure in improving education.

Arguably the most significant failure in Chinese education was seen through the Cultural Revolution. In May of 1966, the Central Committee’s ‘Decision on the Cultural Revolution’ announced that ‘The task of the Cultural Revolution is to reform the old educational system and educational philosophy and methodology’. This saw a complete shift in the education system in China as well as people’s views towards it. Mao believed that it was more important for young people to experience the Revolution than to receive a traditional education and therefore, he offered students the opportunity to experience true revolutionary fervour. The Red Guard - the radical youth of the Cultural Revolution - had abandoned their education in order to travel to Beijing to attend the eight massive rallies. As a result, a wave of violence had spread across Beijing wherein teachers were the primary victims. Upon the command of wall poster which urged students to ‘eliminate all demons and monsters and carry the socialist revolution through the end.’, students began to attack and denounce their teachers. This ultimately had a lasting impact on the students’ attitudes to learning as most became skeptical of the education system as a whole. A notable example of this rebellion, as well as loss of faith in the education system, is when a student, Zhang Tieshang, submitted a blank examination paper for his college admissions test. Towards the end of the Cultural Revolution, many of the young people had been sent to the countryside instead of going back to school. This was part of the ‘Up to the mountains and down to the village’ campaign which was intended for the youth to learn the value of hard labour and to live amongst peasants. This had left China with a shattered education system and a generation of young people who were lacking formal education in turn reverting back to Pre-Communist China levels of education.

To conclude, between the years 1949 and 1976 the CCP had ultimately failed to improve education within China, despite the early successes. This failure was mostly a result of Mao’s later disregard for education and his desire to create a labour driven workforce to industrialise China. This had resulted in a complete abandonment of the education system as students were now more focused on proving their ideological commitment than educational credentials. In turn, the successes made in the early years of the regime had been reversed and education had now become redundant.