ABSTRACT
Education presents every society with difficult choices. In less-developed countries like China, limited financial resources and a lack of trained teachers placed further constraints on the educational system. The Chinese communist party faced decisions on whom to educate, on what topics, and in what numbers. The party’s task involved expanding and revising the educational system which it had inherited from the republican government. The theoretical debate on education during the Cultural Revolution centered on the need to suppress bourgeois and feudal attitudes in the pedagogical system so that “the revolutionary successor generation” could be properly prepared to assume its role in the march toward communism. Decentralization was another feature of the educational system to emerge from the Cultural Revolution. In rural areas, the decollectivization of agriculture removed an important underpinning of the collective management of education. Straitened educational budgets could be met by means other than raising fees, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
