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Our Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Proposition on the Contemporary World Proletarian Revolution
Editor’s Note：
1、The education system under capitalist society naturally serves the bourgeois ruling class, aiming to cultivate the proletariat into obedient slaves, and is fraught with exploitation and oppression. Consequently, students lacking the guidance of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory are prone to indulging in ‘tittytainment’ (mass pacification) to escape such oppression. This is, in essence, a spontaneous form of passive resistance, rooted in class contradictions. Therefore, to fundamentally resolve this issue, it is imperative to build a tight-knit underground organization of revolutionaries through the political-newspaper line, seize power through armed revolution under the leadership of the vanguard party, establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, and ensure that the educational system serves the proletariat.
原文：资本主义社会下的教育体系自然是为资产阶级统治者服务的，是为了将无产阶级培养成听话的奴隶，充斥着剥削压迫，因此这种情况下缺乏马列毛理论指导的学生很容易就会沉迷于奶头乐，想要逃离这种压迫，这本质上是一种自发的消极反抗，根源在于阶级矛盾。因此，要从根本上解决这个问题，就必须通过政治报路线去建设出一个严密的地下革命家组织，在先锋队的领导下通过武装革命实现夺权，建立无产阶级专政，让教育制度服务于无产阶级。
2、A child is a blank slate at birth; in a bourgeois society, they will develop in whatever way they are driven to develop. The bourgeoisie produces a vast amount of “tittytainment” to bewitch the people, yet blames their children for being addicted to electronic devices instead of reading “great classics”—which, in essence, remain the products of bourgeois ideology. The so-called “well-behaved, upright, and obedient students” are, without exception, defined by qualities deemed desirable strictly from the perspective of bourgeois interests.
The current shortcomings of education are, in fact, the evil fruits of the bourgeoisie, yet the ultimate culprits shift the blame across various fronts. We must overthrow the entire bourgeois world, including its educational system, through the victory of the proletarian revolution, and rebuild a socialist educational system truly guided by the correct political line and practical experience, so that children can receive a genuinely good education.
原文：一个孩子在他出生时是一张白纸，在资产阶级社会下他们让孩子怎么去发展就会怎么发展，资产阶级制造了大量迷惑人民的奶头乐，却指责人民的子女沉迷于电子产品不去阅读本质上依然是资产阶级思想产物的“伟大经典”，他们所谓的“品行端正、腰板挺直、循规蹈矩的学生”无一不是从资产阶级利益视角去看的良好品质。当今教育的缺失实际上就是资产阶级的恶果，而罪魁祸首却在各种方面上转嫁矛盾，我们必须要通过无产阶级革命的胜利推翻整个包括教育体系在内的资产阶级世界，重建真正以路线挂帅实践挂帅的社会主义教育体系，才能让孩子们得到真正良好的教育。
Recently in the United States various pundits and articles, as well as members of the general public, have raised a hullabaloo, ringing the danger bell for the ongoing collapse of youth education. Chief among their complaints is that of literacy. The children do not read, they say (indeed, cannot read!), and are instead ‘brainwashed’ by their phones, consuming garbage, and lack culture as a general rule. What happened to the great classics, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Steinbeck and all the rest of the good stuff that was taught ‘back in our day’! Back in our day! when we were such fine, straight-backed, and obedient students.
This recurrent griping, a pernicious immaturity common to the ‘mature’, or adult, who seem to have forgotten how their own elders talked of them, is of course nonsense in its content and form. However, as this cycle intensifies once again in the United States, it presents us a useful opportunity to conduct a shallow social analysis (which is all that can fit in this short article). I think it would also be useful as a comparison point that Chinese readers can use. Is the vocabulary, the discourse, similar at all across countries? We will see that, in general, there is firstly a tendency to view children as passive and stupid, if not by nature then by nurture. Secondly, there is a strong petite-bourgeois reaction to emphasise the family unit as the medicine to cure the ills of the education system. Besides that, a number of simple cure-alls are proposed by both teachers and laypeople–which, when applied, would cleanly resolve all the messy problems of education.
I am going to draw and quote from a Reddit thread, which I feel contains exemplary quotes that sum up much of the conversation surrounding me, on media and from people I have encountered. I use the comments as representatives of general, liberal opinion.
The title of the Reddit thread is “Teachers of Reddit: Is Gen Alpha really struggling with basic reading, writing, and math skills? If so, what does that look like in your classroom?”, located on the AskReddit subreddit. The top comment (determined by ‘upvotes’ which are similar to ‘likes’ or ‘hearts’ on other social media) goes as such:
“It’s not just basic reading. It’s learned helplessness. I have kids who simply cannot do anything independently. Attention span is part of it, but a lot if them just can’t do it unless told exactly what to do, and yes, even if the directions are on the paper.”
So we have a list of issues, summed up by the umbrella issue of “helplessness”. The subcomments come from non-teachers. They provide a number of potential cures to helplessness. For example:
“Yes, this was the most frustrating thing for me as an elder gen Z! It’s the lack of problem solving ability, which often comes with a lack of curiosity in the world in my experience.”
“Curiosity in the world”, then, would resolve problem solving ability, thus solving helplessness. What else?
“It’s the lack of boredom. Bored kids draw. Play an instrument. Go outside. Write poems. Ask their parents for something to do. Kids who are plugged in 24/7 do none of those things.”
Boredom as well, it seems, is what’s the problem. The comment itself is heavy with nostalgia—the writer reminiscing of their own halcyon days. Anyways, boredom and attention span recur often in this thread.
As we scroll further down this thread, we encounter statements about how teachers “removed consequences for their [children’s] inaction”, “over-scaffolded everything, so now thinking isn’t really required”, how the problem with children is that “parents stick a screen in their [children’s] face”, “AI”, “fear of failure”, “social media”, that they “refuse to think”. This is coupled with stories meant to shock, about how they teach children who cannot spell the word “cat”, how children cannot play board games because they cannot read the instructions, they do not know how many sides are on a triangle, they “won’t read even a paragraph let alone comprehend it”, are bad at spelling, statements like “It’s the worst environment I’ve seen in 30 years”, etc.
What is the ideological function of these statements; which class do they serve? From these comments we get the sense that children are inherently lazy. It is claimed that when provided with AI, children cannot help but outsource their thinking. Children are now incurious, etc. What’s more, the school system itself is unable to correct the problem. Instead, everything starts and ends at the home, for example:
"Parents have failed their kids by not having them read more at a young age, instead they gave them phones and social media"
Such a comment is repeated in varying form throughout the thread.
This is a far cry from even bourgeois education movements of the past in the USA (e.g. the Progressive Movement), which advocated for a centralization of education, and a diminution of parental importance in education. Essentially, the comments describe a petite-bourgeois view, which has become hegemonic in discourse about education in the country.
When faced with troubles in education, the first move is a call for retreat into the family. Petty-bourgeois commenters encourage parents to spend more and more time with their children, etc. The common school is given up. Instead of an equal ground to facilitate intellectual development, supported by a social fund, doled out by the state, they uphold the petty intellectual resources of the family. They wish to encourage the situation where a minority of children are able to benefit, due to highly educated parents, and the rest are left behind, as their families lack the requisite background. In other words, a reactionary step back from the socialized common school with a collective school life.
But problems with education and students’ boredom cannot be resolved by changes in teaching methods, or the involvement of parents. And students will continue to be criticized for never measuring up to their school’s standards. The contradictions that run through the school system, such as that between humanistic and vocational education, cannot be grasped at the root without a proletariat social revolution. Among the functions of education in capitalism is to encourage the division between mental and physical labor, the creation of bourgeois experts, to inculcate bourgeois ideology, and so on. Consequently, the entire social complex must be changed, and education can then transform to become for the masses.
The Cultural Revolution is the exemplar of such a social revolution. Education was transformed into something new, radical, and connected to labor and work instead of existing as a means to produce people who would stand above labor. Both the classical style and Western (from missionaries) style were swept away. Liu Shaoqi’s line of elite, privileged education was attacked. Mao Zedong thought provided moral and political guidance, but also an appeal to apply the scientific method to daily life. Brilliant work by people like Tu Youyou could not have been done without the supportive social structure behind them. Movies such as Counterattack and Breaking with Old Ideas portray the school system in a beautiful visual manner. When compared with China’s contemporary school system, with its wasteful rote work, brutal work-hours, and malformation of human bodies (e.g. the endemic presence of myopia)–it is clear that the school system of the Cultural Revolution not only furnished its students with knowledge, useful and alive, but also educated them in the richest sense of the word, robust ideologically, intellectually, and physically, capable and ready to transform the world.