Schools and Progress in the People's Republic of China

Abstract

T his report provides ethnographic descriptions of schools in the People's Republic of China (PRC) derived from a visit to the PRC in December, 1972. The paper extends my report of meetings with PRC psychologists and officials responsible for Sino-American exchange of scholars and students (Yee, 1973). Since I was a university student in Canton in 1947-48, a year before the founding of the PRC, this report is comparative in part. The paper begins with a brief background, describes the schools visited, and concludes with interpretative comments. Since 1949, education has been China's chief instrument for class revolution (Fraser & Hawkins, 1972). Improving the status of soldiers, workers, and peasants has been given top priority. Educated Chinese have had the difficult role of reconciling their bourgeois intellectual attitudes and knowledge with the mass line, while at the same time providing instruction and expertise. China's educational efforts appear to be the world's most revolutionary in terms of both objectives and achievement in recent time. It has been estimated that in 1949, the 450 million Chinese over seven years of age averaged less than two years of education. In 1959, elementary education was nearly universal, and junior high schooling became almost universal in cities and nearby rural areas. From 1959-66, national school enrollment grew to about 100 million and by 1966, persons over seven averaged four years of education (Kimball and O'Connell, 1972). Today, the adult literacy rate is probably 60 or more percent, since I was told people up to age 40 have learned to read. Maoist doctrine holds that knowl-