Schools Abroad: Back to the Books in China

In the 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, Mao's advisers are proposing to scrap the old curriculum, generally based on Western models, and substitute instead a program aimed at producing indoctrinated revolutionists first, scholars and technicians second, which may keep China's schools and universities hobbled for years to come.

At the moment, Red China's new architect of education, Chen Pota, encouraged by such relative moderates as Chou Enlai, is engaged in a titanic effort to get Chinese students headed back into the schoolrooms. An "urgent appeal" to primary-and secondary-school pupils to return went out last February, and similar orders were given for college and university students in March. But as of last week, only 31 of China's 840 universities and colleges had resumed classes on even a token level, and the percentage of secondary schools open was just as low. In most cases the schoolrooms to which the students returned bore little resemblance to those they had left. Teaching equipment has been carried off or damaged, walls are hung with soggy, frayed posters and slogans, windows are broken, toilets fouled, and walls are blackened by the winter fires of the Red Guards.

Dancing the Message. Most crippling of all is the disappearance of many of the teaching staff, unwilling to return to the scenes of their humiliation. Some professors are reluctant to resume teaching because all old textbooks have been condemned and new ones are nowhere in sight. Contributing to the dearth of teachers is the slow "rehabilitation" process; thousands were specifically labeled "monsters" and "demons" by the Red Guards, and barely a hundred have since been cleared. Without supervision, classrooms are often split into feuding student factions. "No one is in charge; no one dares to be," wrote one Shanghai student recently to a friend in Hong Kong. To fill the vacuum, army officers have been called in to give military instruction and keep a semblance of order.

But so 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.