THROUGHOUT the Covid-19 pandemic, the issue of education within Britain came to the forefront of the British consciousness from the issue of examinations and assessment to lockdown learning and the role of education as a vital tool to overcome child poverty as highlighted by the work of the National Education Union, among others.

The emergence of these issues has led the British government to launch the Curriculum and Assessment Review to explore the reforms needed to begin to solve the problems rooted deeply within the British education system.

It is therefore vital that educators and trade unionists across Britain seek to examine and apply lessons from alternative forms of education across the globe for post-Covid British education — most notably through an examination of progressive forms of education, such as the Chinese approach, if we are to forge an education system ready to face the challenges on the horizon.

Education before the revolution

Education in China before its Westernisation in the early 20th century was a highly developed system reserved solely for the offspring of the ruling class. The system was based on Confucian social philosophy, namely that there is an innate inequality within human beings, which was used to reinforce the deeply entrenched class system stemming from the emperor.

This class system relied on the education system to produce highly educated mandarins sourced from of the sons of noble families to reinforce the rule of the emperor. The children of the peasants, at the time making up 90 per cent of the population, received no formal education and were instead forced to labour in the fields alongside their parents.

The first changes to the centuries-old traditional Chinese education system came at first from Western influences in the 1911 nationalist revolution. The revolution sought to modernise China and succeeded in overthrowing the ancient imperial order.

The leaders of this revolution emerged from either Christian mission schools in China or abroad and sought to replicate these forms of education centred around the bourgeois ideals of economic, technical and scientific efficiency.

The education system of the new Chinese republic would seek to create a new elite moulded along Western lines in an attempt to drag China into the modern capitalist world with little regard for the great majority of its people. These policies would leave the peasant masses in illiteracy with only 15 per cent of Chinese children attending primary schools and 10 per cent attending middle school by 1937.

The first genuine attempts at pursuing mass education in China emerged in the rural soviets set up by the Communist Party of China (CPC) under the leadership of Mao Zedong in Jiangxi. These first attempts were led by the soviet government established in a mountainous area within the Jiangxi province in 1931 through its constitution that placed education as a priority for the newly formed government.

These priorities included three key focuses for education namely “the right of all workers, peasants and other working people to education; the introduction of free schools for all children to be embarked upon immediately; educational establishments to be run by the people with support from the party.”

During both the Yan’an period (1933-45) and the third revolutionary civil war (1946-49), Chinese communists made immense efforts to follow these key aims by establishing schools and education courses wherever soviets were established.

These efforts were recognised by Edgar Snow when he visited Yan’an in 1936, where upon arrival he found that more than 200 primary schools had been established in the region. As well as a teacher training college for primary teachers, an agricultural school, a trade union school and a CPC school which consisted of 400 students.

Despite these huge successes, there were immense problems still to overcome in the liberated regions with 95 per cent of the population still illiterate, no pre-existing school buildings, virtually no books and very few teaching materials. But the experiences gained in the liberated areas would prove vital in the shaping of China’s new education system following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Education after the revolution

The first few years of the People’s Republic of China were focused on restoring order, restarting the devastated economy and laying the foundations for a successful transition to socialism.

At first, the fledgling republic sought to emulate the successful Soviet model of development through the construction of a five-year plan centred around the use of agriculture to drive investment in heavy industry with the goal of establishing 150 heavy industrial plants.

Within this period the education system had two main tasks: the first was to quickly train the experts needed for the new emerging industries and, the other was to raise the level of basic education with the goal of involving peasants and workers in the struggle for building a socialist society.

Following the passage of the 1949 common programme of the Chinese government (a temporary constitution) there was a rapid expansion in the availability of access to Chinese schools with the number of pupils attending primary schools rising from 24 million in 1949 to 64 million in 1956 with a rise in the number of secondary school pupils attending schools rising from 1 to 6 million in the same period.

Alongside this dramatic increase in the number of Chinese youths attending schools founded in the first decade of the People’s Republic, there was simultaneously a mass literacy campaign built in the factories and the fields with lessons taking place in many places on lunch breaks or within evening classes led by local people in each area. These efforts worked together to achieve the colossal task of reducing illiteracy to below 10 per cent in many areas by 1958.

As the People’s Republic of China entered the second phase of its development best summarised through the policy of “reform and opening up” from the end of 1978, the gains made for Chinese education under the government of Mao were expanded and deepened through the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.

Deng’s education reforms were centred around developing education across all regions of the country simultaneously and harnessing the technological progress emerging in the late 1970s through an emphasis placed on the pursuit of progress in stem subjects.

One of the key elements of this reform was to devolve most pedagogical decision-making out to local authorities as part of the 1985 reform of the ministry of education. The devolution of pedagogical decision-making enabled these bodies to shape education to meet the needs of the local community in its efforts to pursue the economic growth achieved through Deng’s reforms.

It is clear that the reforms pursued by Deng; both in terms of the devolution of pedagogical power and the targeted pursuit of progress in key STEM subjects have laid the groundwork for the formation of the new era of Chinese development in the 21st century.

In the new era, it is possible to see the fruits of those reforms with China supporting the world’s largest education sector with 270 million students enrolled in 514,000 educational institutions. Within this education sector, it has been possible to recognise key support programmes which have enabled equitable access to high-quality education across all regions of the country.

In particular, the national student nutrition programme has supported 37 million students across rural China to access education through the provision of high-quality meals daily. Xi Jinping’s government has also focused on tackling the growing mental health crisis faced by students through the successful passage of the double reduction policy which looked to restrict the amount of homework and additional tutoring undertaken by students.

The need for this reform is born from the statistics that 87.6 per cent of junior to high school students finish homework after 10pm most nights and sleep for less than eight hours, which has been seen as a contributing factor to 22 per cent of all adolescent suicides being directly attributed to study stress.

It would be remiss not to also highlight the monumental efforts undertaken by Xi’s government since 2012 to alleviate poverty across China. Since 2012, the government has worked to lift 100 million of its population out of poverty through a mass mobilisation of China’s citizens and CPC cadres. These achievements will undoubtedly aid the Chinese people in achieving their goal of becoming a leading nation in terms of education by 2035.

It is logical therefore for British educators, progressives, socialists and, trade unionists alike to seek to learn lessons from the Chinese education system due to its role in defeating illiteracy and, the work produced to transform China’s economy into the industrial and scientific powerhouse it is today.