(November 14, 1958)
I’ll go check it out.
Sichuan
Mao Zedong’s marginal note was written beside the article “Yueyang County Town Subdistrict Is Preparing to Establish a People’s Public School,” which appeared in Issue No. 2630 of the Xinhua News Agency’s internally circulated publication “Internal Reference” dated November 11, 1958. The article stated that at the end of October, the Yueyang County Committee of the Communist Party of China in Hunan Province had convened a meeting of heads of three schools and four factories in the town subdistrict, deciding to set up a people’s public school and establishing the “Yuezhou People’s Public School–Steel and Machinery Joint Enterprise Committee.” The purpose of founding this school was to more closely integrate teaching with production, implementing the policy of schools running factories and factories running schools, so that both students and workers would have opportunities for study as well as periods of labor practice, thereby cultivating a large contingent of intellectual workers from the working class and “red experts” to accelerate the cultural and technological revolution. There were three major advantages to establishing the people’s public school: first, it could rapidly eliminate the distinction between mental and manual labor, fundamentally eradicating the bourgeois attitude of disdain for manual work and training students and workers into a new type of thoroughly revolutionary and highly specialized laborers; second, it could greatly boost production and advance the technological revolution; and third, it could put into practice the principle of using enterprises to support schools, abolishing tuition fees, making education free, and reducing the financial burden on the state for educational undertakings. The article also outlined arrangements regarding the organizational structure, the integration of teaching and labor, and living and welfare provisions for the newly established people’s public school.