Education should be revolutionized: Chairman Mao

The People's Liberation Army should be a great school. In this school, our army should study politics and military affairs, raise its educational level, and also engage in agriculture and side-occupations and run small or medium-sized factories to make products for its own needs or for exchange with the state against equal values. Our army should also do mass work and participate in the socialist education movement in the factories and the villages. When the socialist education movement is over, it will always find mass work to do so as to be always at one with the masses. Also our army should always be ready to participate in the struggles to criticize and repudiate the bourgeoisie in the cultural revolution. In this way, the army can concurrently engage in study, agriculture, industry and mass work. Of course, these tasks should be properly coordinated and a distinction should be made between the primary and secondary tasks. Each army unit should concurrently engage in one or two of the three tasks of agriculture, industry and mass work, but not in all three. Our army of several million will play a very great role in this way.

While mainly engaging in industrial activity, workers should also study military affairs and politics and raise their educational level. They, too, should carry out the socialist education movement and criticize and repudiate the bourgeoisie. Where conditions permit, they should also engage in agriculture and side-occupations, just as people do in the Taching oilfield.

While mainly engaging in agricultural production (including forestry, animal husbandry, side-occupations and fisheries), the peasants in the communes should at the same time study military affairs and politics and raise their educational level. When conditions permit, they should collectively run some small factories. They also should criticize and repudiate the bourgeoisie.

The same holds good for the students too. While their main task is to study, they should also learn other things, that is to say, they should not only learn book knowledge, they should also learn industrial production, agricultural production and military affairs. They also should criticize and repudiate the bourgeoisie. The length of schooling should be shortened, education should be revolutionized, and the domination of our schools and colleges by bourgeois intellectuals should not be tolerated any longer.

Where conditions permit. those working in commerce, the service trades and Party and government organizations should do the same. - Chairman Mao, May 1966