He explained that a first bag task had been for the teachers in each department to take a critical look at the curriculum. Should this or that course be kept, or discarded?
Discussions could be long, sometimes heated, sometimes tedious. But when a decision had been reached that a certain course should be omitted, it was dropped, and good riddance. Then what to do about courses which were in part still relevant? They had to be overhauled in detail; new outlines, textbooks and collateral reading had to be prepared. Perhaps most important of all was for the teachers to see the material of their field in a new light.
Therefore they, who had long been "much conditioned by their bourgeois background," were required, during and after the Cultural Revolution, to study Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Tse-tung Thought. How irrelevant and what a bore, some of them at first supposed. But they found that, even after only a first look at Mark's analysis of capitalist society and the class struggle, they were able to see in certain standard book new significance. After reading Lenin on revolution and imperialism, they could no longer teach the familiar material in the same old way, And when they had understood, Mao Tse-fung`s thought on self-criticism, self-reliance, and serving the people, they found themselves-with generous assists from some of the students-much clearer about what to teach and how to teach it.
Some of the big-character posters criticized teaching materials in the English Department, For Years. Professor Chen had been teaching about Dr, Samuel Johnson and other 18th century writers, But, he said, he same to see that most of this material had comparatively little significance today.
I hadn't gone among the students much. He added to see how they were learning we used to the old ways Butaller much debate with each other and the students, we realized that the old ways must be changed as soon as possible, and thoroughly.
"We saw also," he continued, "that we must replace the counter revolutionary line in education which before the Cultural Revolution, had wasted the students time and eyesight."
New students would soon be coming up from the farms and factors bringing new problems which they needed education to help solve. So the universities were tem petrels closed and the teachers were required to go out of the communes and industrial plants, live with the people, work, alongside them, and learn much that was bound to reeducate themselves and make them better teachers.
All these changes took time, Many people in the West said, it was outrageous that half-baked school kids could shut down the universities and deny higher education to the Chinese people. But why offer dead wood to live students?
Another of the senior faculty members commented: "We had made a lot of mistakes, and we needed to get a re-education in political thought. The big character posters were often directed against us, We had taught what we had been taught. That won't do! So we spent a lot of time with the students, going over materials and methods. We came to understand that sticking to Chairman Mao Tse-tung`s revolutionary line can enable one to solve very difficult problems, from this emphasis on self-criticism and self-reliance comes a united effort for the well-being of our socialist country.
"You ask whether another Cultural Revolution will be needed in China? This depends on developments that we cannot yet foresee, Chairman Mao Tse-tung predicts more than one such revolution in future years. There's no doubt that another cultural revolution would, like this one, bring a big advance to the Chinese people."