| Of all the titles given him during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong liked only one: a great teacher, for he had been a school principal and a teacher, and throughout his life it had always been one of his major concerns to raise the cultural standard of the nation through education.; When he was young, Mao enrolled himself into a normal school and pursued teaching as a profession, intending to save the nation through mass education. After he became a Marxist revolutionary, Mao continued his efforts in educational reform. During the long warring years from 1927 to 1949, Mao did the following three things: pushing forward the drive of mass education of workers and peasants; bringing changes in the educational system so as to make education serve practical purposes; encouraging pedagogical reforms to make teaching-learning more effective and meaningful. After the founding of the People's Republic, Mao introduced revolution into education to construct a whole new educational system. He declared education for New China shall be national, popular and scientific. Illiteracy was reduced to as low as 7%. Meanwhile a socialist educational principle was formed for the young: Education must serve the proletariat politics and be combined with productive labor; everyone who receives an education shall develop morally, intellectually, and physically and become a worker with both socialist consciousness and culture. Mao was strongly for a humanistic and joyful learning experience for children. Mao's conflict with the bureaucrats resulted in the Culture Revolution, during which Mao's educational theories were fully carried out, and in certain areas to the extremes.; Philosophically, Mao placed a high value on the external natural world. He held Marxist materialist practice-oriented epistemology, believing in the unity of knowing and doing. The core of the theory is: practice is the source of knowledge; practice is the impetus to the development of knowledge; practice is the only criterion to test knowledge; and practice is the purpose of knowledge. Mao's ontology and epistemology played the major role in shaping his educational policies and the construction of practice centered school curriculum.; Research findings show a clear linkage between Mao Zedong's philosophy and his educational practice, a predominating consistency to this linkage, and an interesting and meaningful fact that overall the pendulum of the Chinese education is swinging back to Mao's path after a decade's breaking-away from him after his death in 1976. |
