Education and Literacy in China’s Youth

If there is one thing to be said about the Cultural Revolution is that it had unfortunately held back China, and its people from the rest of the world. As if China was put into some sort of stand still, where nothing on the outside mattered, and what mattered on the inside was being put aside for other regimes. Because of all of this, we see a struggle emerging in China’s youth past in terms of the Cultural Revolution and the youth of today by means of education and literacy.

Education has always held high prestige in most countries, but for China at the time, the educational system held no precious value. Many high schools and colleges were closed because of Mao’s orders, “the real reason behind Mao Zedong’s decision was unclear.” Was it a ploy or simply a revolutionary fantasy to create a new generation? By the end of the revolution about a million college students neglected their studies, there were more then two million senior high school students who had done the same. In some regions of China all high school graduates were transferred to the countryside, and senior high schools closed completely. This can also be seen in Dai Sijie’s book Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, where the narrator and friend Luo were in such a camp. They had a hard time adjusting to the life in the country for it was different then the urban world they knew, “I felt chilled to the bone where my despite the fire blazing in the centre of the room.” Many of the students who were brought to the country side endured hardships and struggles. About four millions urban graduates were transferred to the countryside or wilderness, where many youth, faced various problems in terms of food, housing, and medicine.

Expanding horizons of the forbidden literature became central to the novel as the narrator and Luo were finding themselves thriving to claim more books from Four-Eyes.

This was common throughout China, where there was a thirst for knowledge, but nothing to quench it,...