School & Steel

From 5,000 "Active Young Builders of Socialism" meeting last week in Peking, the Central Committee of Red China's Communist Party got a love note: "Our generation of youth will always rally closely around the party and go wherever the party tells us ... We will never disappoint the party in its earnest hopes and will strive to accelerate the building of socialism and to realize mankind's noblest ideal--Communism--in our generation and by our own hands." To millions of hand-blistered Chinese students, the last phrase must ring with ironic accuracy. For much of the impetus in China's "Year of the Leap" (TIME, Dec. 1) has come from daily sessions of mind and muscle-numbing physical labor by the nation's students, who work before and after classes and often during class hours as well.

"Education for education's sake" is now scorned in China as an imperialist luxury. At Loyang, in Honan province, twelve primary schools recently heeded the Central Committee's directive that "the future direction is for schools to run factories and farms, and for factories and agricultural cooperatives to establish schools." They banded together, built the "Red Scarf" steel and iron factory, now claim production of 40 tons of metal daily. To ask that summer vacations be spent vacationing is "a decadent viewpoint ... It should be known that after spending a busy period of time in study, taking up manual work over a short period is good relaxation."

Division of Labor. At the Red Scarf factory, students work according to a "rational division of labor." Children seven to nine years old, the party press notes, generally like to collect nails and bits of wood and carry them in their pockets. This interest is channeled "into the field of significant labor activity" by sending the children outside the factory for two hours each day "to pick iron, scraps, dig and sift ore, gather wood and collect broken bits of earthenware." Students 14 and 15 years old "do the simple jobs of making molds, preparing materials, taking care of machinery and blowing oxygen." Older teen-agers more molten-steel ladles, refine ore and build the brick linings of furnaces. The "young pioneers" work no more than six hours a day, get one day off a week and, the party claims, are gaining weight. Fourteen-year-old Student Pai Chun-hsiang, according to the official account, surprised his fearful parents by becoming a "hardcore member of the factory's materials-preparation section, assistant chief of oxygen blowing, and invented a method of melting aluminum which saves much money for the State."

But not all the student Stakhanovites are happy. Wrote one boy from another area: "All of us are working day and night smelting iron and steel . . . We often stop classes for labor . . . We wash ore or build roads and sometimes we work the whole night without a second to close our eyes. This kind of work is too hard. I don't know what will become of me." A girl university student, whose classes were interrupted by last year's purge of rightists, wrote to a friend ill with tuberculosis: "We were told that this term would start in October and we should be back in class, but now I am working on the night shift in a factory. After the night's work comes morning gymnastics. Last year when you were here things were different; you would hardly recognize our life today. To be frank, I envy you, even with your sickness."

"Sheer Shock Tactics." Chinese Communists now claim to have 25 million children in kindergarten, 92 million (up 8,000,000 since June) in primary schools, 15 million in secondary schools, 790,000 in institutions of higher learning and 60 million in a catchall category, "spare-time schools." Total: 193 million scholars.

What sort of schooling do the student-workers and worker-students get? When the Communists took over in 1949, Chinese illiteracy was estimated at 80%. Now the party claims 80% literacy--with the definition of literacy varying from understanding of a basic 600 characters to comprehension of 1,000-3,000 characters, plus the ability to write. Since March, the rate of "illiteracy elimination" has been souped up, according to official reports, from "two to three years" to "only a month" to "weeks." The worker and peasant masses, says the party, "gobble their knowledge ravenously and learn by sheer shock tactics." Their appetite would please Party Archangel Lenin, who wrote: "If study, education and training are restricted within the schools and are alienated from the invigorating practical life, we can have no confidence in such education."

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