Labor class: Maoist legacy for China's schools

Mao wanted China's educational system to serve the needs of socialism

By Rose Tang
CNN.com Writer

(CNN) -- The school explosion in central China is a sad illustration of how China's education system has gone wrong.

Forcing students to make fireworks might seem like an extreme exploitation of child labor, but in fact, production of goods, ranging from toys to industrial paints, has always been included in the Chinese school curriculum.

It's called "labor class".

The class has its roots in the 1950s when, in the early days of the People's Republic, Chairman Mao Zedong called for China's education system to be redesigned to serve socialism.

His idea was to combine textbook studies with agricultural and industrial production. In another words, the practice was to bring students closer to the proletariat.

It was compulsory for all students of all levels, primary and high schools, and tertiary institutions, to complete such labor classes.

Labor lesson was not just about making things once a week; us students were also sent to the countryside and factories to learn from our "peasant uncles" and "worker uncles".

Young students went to the country to help with rice planting and harvests twice a year. The month-long sessions were considered crucial to test a student's political level.

It was a romantic but, in practice, clumsy idea to make students understand how they could explore society and learn to appreciate things through working shoulder to shoulder with peasants and workers.

Great leap forward

Labor classes hit a hysterical level during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s.

Schoolyards were taken over by smelting ovens to make steel. Students and teachers took woks, beds and door handles -- anything made of iron from their homes to be melted in the ovens.

I was too young to catch the craze. The Cultural Revolution was nearly over when I went to school in 1975.

My primary school was on the outskirts of Chengdu in southwestern China. The zealous political campaigns had died down but the labor classes went on.

Every Tuesday afternoon was the wonderful labor class. Every kid loved it because it involved little brainwork and certainly no exams. We made all sorts of little things.

The most memorable item was also the most mysterious one - neatly packed long strips of toilet tissue. I was eight then.

Classroom production line

We sat in the classroom and folded pieces of coarse, hard toilet paper into long strips, and then wrapped them with brown paper. Although we had no idea what we were making, it was great fun to compete how fast and skillful one could get with the toilet paper.

It was until a few years later I realized our products were women's sanitary pads, and all the money went to the school.

Making things may have been fun, but carrying bricks at the schools' construction sites was a pain. The school was building another classroom block and, although we were just 11, we had to contribute our labor.

Nearly every school nearby had a little factory, producing anything from machine parts to books, to help the school budget.

Now though, years of economic reforms have shaken up the education sector.

Beijing has been urging people to donate to local schools in order to help make ends meet, but this campaign, called the "Hope Project", has helped only a few students.

Today many schools are forced to impose all kinds of extra fees on parents to finance their child's education, often running to tens of thousands of yuan.

While most schools only regard labor classes as a handicrafts course, a growing number of cash-strapped schools have resorted to students' labor to help balance the books.

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