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Revolution in Education: China and Cuba in Global Context, 1957–76
Yinghong Cheng, Patrick Manning
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In 1969, when Fidel Castro was asked about the similarities between China's ongoing Cultural Revolution and Cuba's unfolding Revolutionary Offensive, he answered: "If we did something similar to the Chinese Communists, it was a historical accident."1 Castro was claiming his political and ideological originality because, even for casual observers, the parallels between the two campaigns were apparent. Both of them relied upon mass mobilization, promoted moral incentives, targeted an egalitarian society, hoped to turn the young generation into a "new man," and condemned the betrayal or at least corruption of the Soviet Union.2 |
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But perhaps the most identical dimension of the two campaigns was their educational revolutions. The ultimate goal in each case was to break all institutional barriers between school and society. While approaches toward this goal varied, in both countries the integration of study with work was pivotal. In order to achieve this integration, students and faculty were sent to farms and factories; curricula were formulated based on immediate agricultural and industrial needs; schools, factories, and farms shared management; classroom-centered schooling was replaced by work-study programs; workers and farmers were dispatched to take up teaching and school-management positions; and full-time and institutional facilities were increasingly replaced by part-time and noninstitutional programs. The objective of this new educational system was to create not intellectuals, bureaucrats, or technocrats, but practically minded and pragmatically trained laborers. It is also noteworthy that all of these policies relied on a strong moral sense: they were intended to realize social equity, especially in terms of eliminating the division between city and countryside, elites and commoners, and mental and physical labor. In a word, they were part of the grand vision of a future, classless communist society. |
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Educators outside of the communist world recognized and even embraced the significance of the Chinese and Cuban educational experiments. As a UNESCO foreword for a Cuban education report in 1975 pointed out, it was "one of the extreme cases where everything in the education system constitutes a break, not only with the past, but also with what exists everywhere."3 At roughly the same time an American educator wrote that China's educational reform was "one of the most extraordinary sets of events in educational changes in contemporary times."4 In the Third World, the Chinese and Cuban educational innovations were also taken as an efficient tool for universalizing education. |
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Little evidence, however, suggests that China and Cuba turned to each other in search of inspiration, though both regimes had earlier sought to imitate the Soviet model. In this sense Castro's claim is legitimate. Paradoxically, it is this coincidence that makes the concurrence of the two campaigns even more meaningful than imitation or inspiration. |
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