The New Mood on Campus

Canton... The large provincial teachers' college outside Canton witnessed serious student Red Guard clashes four years ago during the days of Cultural Revolution. Today every trace of those tumultuous years has been assiduously repaired. The lovely kilometer-square campus of spacious groves, fields and ponds is quiet, bucolic and rather sleepy. Appropriate to the gentle pastoral setting, it was the radical student faction which lost out in 1967. The army of Gen. Huang Yung-sheng, Lin Piao's closest associate, intervened province wide on the side of law-and-order and Party control.

Kwangtung Provincial Teachers' Training College was re-opened just one year ago, and the same professors who occupied the classroom podiums before Mao ignited the Cultural Revolution are back at work. At the school's helm, moreover, are many of the same school officials who four years ago came under fierce fire for bureaucratic airs and "capitalist-road" educational policies.

But the college is not what it used to be. The personnel may look familiar, but a Maoist education revolution has swept a new style of schooling into the old buildings. The college's goal now is to devise an educational framework that re-unites China's student population with the working-class background most of the students spring from.

The Kwangtung Teachers' Training College has been given the major responsibility for compiling the textbooks used throughout the province's primary and high schools. Quotes from Mao are used liberally in the new texts to instruct students in "proletarian consciousness," according to a college official. The new primers--"still very much in the experimental stage" and therefore forbidden to foreigners--reportedly attempt to focus children's attention back toward the practical needs of their communities.

To this end, parent-teacher groups often supplement the college's new textbooks with their own. Professors and their students cooperate in writing the texts, which are then sent to local communities for criticisms by workers, peasants and soldiers.

The college's own students learn in their two-year course of study how to steer teenagers' attitudes away from "bourgeois" careerism and alleged intellectual elitism. One method is to dirty school-children's hands with frequent stints of manual labor. The young future teachers must themselves engage part-time in labor.

In the college-operated radio-assembly shop, thirty of them were industriously at work. While working there, they are to learn sufficient radio technology to teach radio assembly in high-school. At the college's 32-acre farm all the teacher trainees must bend their backs to experimental rice crops. Under the supervision of experienced peasants, they practice new techniques of planting and hybridization. Up the hill, at the school's 100-pig breeding sty, a dozen young women were learning how to relieve pig asthma through acupuncture.

Next year, the teachers' college will open a branch-school in a rural district, where the teacher trainees presumably can better intermingle with the peasantry.

The students say they already had experienced heavy draughts of labor even before entering the college's gates. After graduation from junior or senior high school, all of them had taken up physical labor at an agricultural commune, factory or army unit for a period of at least two years.

One young man said he had held a factory job for more than seven years. His workmates had selected him to become a teacher, and the factory authorities and college administrators had given the necessary approval, he said. The major criterion for selection had been his sound "proletarian" political philosophy.

Almost all of the college's 1,300 students are members of the Communist Party or Young Communist League--prestigious status to attain in today's China. As the Kwangtung Teachers' Training College swings once more into full operation, enrollment will rise dramatically to 3000-4000 trainees next year. Already there are 1,700 cadres, teachers and staff on campus, of whom 800 are faculty.

The professors provide the college with its major worry, according to Prof. Kwan Li, a young literature teacher who was severely criticized during the Cultural Revolution. "I myself used to put vocational training and intellectual theorizing in first place," he said. "But I can see now that the students who struggled against me were correct."

After the Cultural Revolution, the teachers' college opened a rural "May 7 cadre school," where professors went in turn to rough it, engage in heavy physical labor, and study Maoist politics. Its purpose apparently fulfilled, the cadre school will close next year.

In April, 1969 the worker and army teams that had taken over the college during the last phases of the Cultural Revolution organized "mobile coaching teams." Professor Kwan signed up and traveled with his colleagues through rural countries. "We were able to study from the masses, make investigations, find out local needs, re-teach local teachers, and begin to re-think and revise our own educational standpoints," Professor Kwan said.

"Our Chairman Mao," he observed, "teaches us that the main problem in teaching reform is the teachers."