Current Situation of Students
7. Society shapes education, and education reflects society. Criticizing education without considering their connection is one-sided.
China’s child labor has another name, which is students.
Students generate value (such as grades) through work (mainly learning), which is owned by schools and teachers. Conversely, they feedback a small part of it to strengthen the previous process.
This phenomenon of involuntarily occupying others’ value is due to the privatization of educational resources. And this is the root cause of all conflicts related to education.
The popularization of education is the result of socialized mass production. Education is for serving society. Therefore, it itself is a filter to select loyal slaves who can bring benefits to society.
Education is a complete industrial chain. In this chain, its exploitation is not as intense as in society. Therefore, the conflicts within it are fundamentally different from those in society.
The stratification among students is determined by the value assigned to them. The consciousness, thinking, and even the quality of education they receive have obvious differences.
The distribution of educational resources is essentially the same as the distribution of social products.
At the end of February, I planned to write a 【Current Situation of Students】, and drafted this outline, but due to various reasons, I did not finish it. So I am sharing it here for discussion. Item seven was originally the last one, but in order to highlight its importance, I put it front, hoping to serve as a summary of the outline. I welcome your suggestions for any shortcomings.
Since I just joined this website not long ago and have had conflicts with many colleagues, I apologize here. After communication, I feel that there is still a gap of about 30 years between us.
At the same time, I have also received many sharp critiques… but it doesn’t matter, your criticism proves that we are thinking and have insight.
With that, this is the conclusion.
Qian
Apart from these two points, I disagree with every other word. And even the second point needs to be corrected.
You do not specify which society’s education you are referring to, which is very imprecise and misleading. Education in a class society does not serve the entire society, but serves the interests of the ruling class. The ruling class is transforming society according to its own class interests. Education in bourgeois society is subordinate to the bourgeoisie, not to bourgeois society itself; it educates obedient slaves to serve the bourgeoisie and its exploitative activities.
The “society” you mention here should include “education.” Since one category is contained within another, there is no such thing as separation. If you change “society” here to “politics,” it might be easier to understand. Bourgeois education serves the ruling class of the bourgeoisie.
This kind of equivalence between students and child labor is also unrealistic; students are petty bourgeois, while workers are proletariat. Only when students decide (or are forced) to give up their speculative illusions, abandon their parasitic and hedonistic lifestyles, that is, give up their petty bourgeois status, and dedicate themselves to the large-scale social production, do they become proletariat.
This view of treating students’ petty bourgeois academic pursuits as work that creates value is also very absurd. Students engage in so-called learning at bourgeois universities mainly to achieve social mobility through “selective exams” and live a good life. This behavior is entirely driven by personal interest, and during this process, no actual value is generated; instead, a large amount of social resources is consumed. The so-called “grades” are only a measure of opportunistic levels; they do not have any substantive impact on society. From a social perspective, they do not contain any value, only the so-called “academic level reference value.” Only labor creates value, and value is a property unique to commodities, i.e., condensed (or materialized) human labor. Clearly, the activities of petty bourgeois opportunistic academic pursuits are not labor and cannot create value. The so-called “ownership” you mention is actually a form of oppression, functioning as coercive discipline, which includes some so-called “targets” and “bonuses.” This is basically a form of oppression masked under fancy rhetoric. The bourgeois university’s oppression of the so-called “Old Nine” (renowned scholars), and in turn, the oppression of students by these scholars, means that failing to meet targets results in performance deductions, criticism, or even threats of dismissal. To meet targets, students are forced to frantically exploit themselves. As for the so-called “feedback,” I think people who taste the sweetness of opportunism will naturally become more frantic in intensifying their opportunistic efforts.
Calling them “senior sister” and “senior brother” is too Confucian, as if those are things from bourgeois academic hierarchy. It’s just that some people entered the school a few years earlier or later, no need to call each other “long” or “jie” or whatever. In the past, within the People’s Liberation Army, officers and soldiers were equal, wearing a red star on their heads, with revolutionary red flags hanging on both sides. We should learn from the PLA. My view is that since we are already on the Marxist platform, everyone should be equal, and we shouldn’t bring old capitalist society titles here. Moreover, the forum is not just for students; many people have already entered factories, and some have even dropped out, and they can also come to comment.
This is entirely absurd fabrication; child labor is child labor, and students are students. These are two completely different categories. Even a hundred years ago in old China, the distinction was clear; today, some people still can’t tell the difference. What is a student? Generally speaking, students are intellectuals. In a class society, intellectuals are not an independent class; they serve various classes of society according to their ideas. Thus, there are bourgeois intellectuals, revolutionary proletariat intellectuals, and petty bourgeois intellectuals. Presently, most students are far removed from direct productive activities; they often rely on their families for support or are parasitic within their households, which is very different from workers and peasants.
Meanwhile, students’ daily life revolves around school and home, confined to these two points. Such a life limits their horizons and surrounds them with bourgeois ideas. In schools, they face the dictatorship of bourgeois teachers; at home, they are often under the dominance of Confucian elders. On one hand, they oppose the contradictions with capitalism; on the other, they have numerous ties to capitalist ways of life and thought. Overall, they are petty bourgeois.
So, what is child labor? Child labor refers to children from impoverished families oppressed by China’s fascist government, forced to work early to support their families or to support themselves to avoid adding extra costs to their households. They work for themselves and eat through their labor, with working conditions varying widely, which can lead to different ideological influences. For instance, some children start working early in small workshops, restaurants, hair salons, etc., places dominated by petty bourgeoisie ideology, which often leads these workers to harbor quite serious petty bourgeois thoughts. The Nazi government outwardly opposes child labor but actually supports it. The children of laboring people are forced to sell their labor early to support themselves and their families, but they are hindered by laws against child labor, making it difficult for them to find jobs. Consequently, they often have no choice but to submit to the harsh environments of underground or black factories, because only in such conditions can their labor be sold to survive.
Their lives are extremely miserable, often worse than those of ordinary workers. Their safety and health are frequently unprotected; some places even have corporal punishment. Years ago, there were reports of child laborers beaten to death by overseers.
Because of this, child laborers are generally considered part of the proletariat. Their mental outlook and ideological state are often much healthier and more normal than those of students in school. Calling students child laborers is a complete misunderstanding, mixing two unrelated and different class groups, equating them as the same.
This statement is even more inexplicable. What is value? According to political economy, value is a form of abstract labor in a society dominated by commodity exchange. Workers’ labor combines with natural objects to form commodities, and workers also solidify their abstract labor within these commodities to create value. Does learning meet this definition? Obviously not. First, we don’t know what material wealth students produce. As you mentioned, grades are not commodities or material wealth; they are just certificates of obedience and tests of student’s submissiveness. They are chains that bind students, not values. As for ownership by schools and teachers, what are they owning? The test papers students have written can be sold as waste paper, filled with exam questions. What kind of feedback are you talking about? Feedback on what?
Perhaps, if students get good grades, teachers and school leaders might get bonuses. But this is completely different from workers’ exploitation. Workers in production truly create commodities and thus create value. The wages paid by the bourgeoisie are based on the value of their labor power—covering basic needs of life, both material and spiritual. The value workers create exceeds this, allowing capitalists to appropriate the surplus value through ownership of the commodities produced by workers, and ultimately, converting it into profit. How does this compare to students? Do bourgeois teachers exchange students’ high scores for goods with education departments to make money? Absolutely not. The goal of bourgeois schools is to turn the children of the working class into obedient servants aligned with bourgeois interests. Grades are the standard to evaluate obedience and servitude. When teachers perform well, the bourgeoisie rewards them with surplus value, encouraging them to continue. Thus, there’s no relationship of ownership or exploitation between students and others. Your argument is a shallow misinterpretation of political economy.
We have already analyzed this; the idea of value possession here is nonsensical. But some terms remain unclear: what is “privatization of educational resources”? And what is “educational conflict”? If “privatization of educational resources” refers to the revival of capitalist education systems, and “educational conflict” to students’ oppression by capitalist education, that is also meaningless, because it implies that the very reason students are oppressed is because of the capitalist education system itself. Such reasoning is absurd. Marxism holds that, in a class society, the educational system is part of the superstructure; different classes develop their own educational lines. The bourgeoisie has its own education line, and the proletariat has its own. The superstructure and the economic base are dialectically related and influence each other. The oppression and exploitation of students today are not due to “privatization of educational resources.” Rather, it’s a result of the restoration of capitalism.
Furthermore, I must point out that the term “privatization of educational resources” itself is also absurd. It’s like telling workers that their suffering is caused by the privatization of factory resources. If workers organize cooperatives to collectivize factory resources, their lives might improve. Such experiments have existed, for example in Mondragon, Spain, initially as cooperative endeavors. But now, these have become monopolistic, oligarchic capitalist enterprises that enslave workers, with no real change in workers’ suffering.
This problematic formulation actually restricts students’ vision. Many student movements have failed because of this mindset; many students, influenced by petty-bourgeois ideology, fail to recognize the strength of the broad working masses. Without Marxist guidance, they do not see that the masses are their solid allies. Only when student slogans go beyond meaningless phrases like “breaking educational monopoly” to demand “eliminating capitalist education systems” will they genuinely harness power. In fact, incidents like the Putian protest and other mass demonstrations show that exposing the brutal oppression of children of workers and peasants by bourgeois education reveals the reactionary nature of the capitalist education system and sparks widespread anger, inspiring masses to fight against bourgeois armed police.
As mentioned above, in a class society, different classes have different educational paths. The bourgeoisie naturally trains the vast majority of workers and peasants in schools to become slaves obedient to their will. However, there is another aspect of the bourgeois education system—its treatment of the children of the bourgeoisie. The children of the bourgeoisie can learn some real skills in school, though mainly they learn how to exploit and enslave people. But under socialist society, things are different. The purpose of education is not to “select loyal slaves who can bring benefits to society,” but to cultivate successors to the proletarian revolutionary movement and to develop revolutionary youth with a high Communist spirit. Therefore, in educational methods, it differs from bourgeois education. Chairman Mao once encouraged students to work part-time while studying, to learn solid cultural knowledge and become knowledgeable revolutionary youth, and at the same time to combine theory with practice by engaging in the three great struggles with the people, testing what they have learned. Mao once said that industrial universities should be established in factories, and agricultural universities should go to the countryside. He also called on China’s youth to go to the mountains and the countryside, to contact and transform themselves through interaction with the most revolutionary poor peasants and rich farmers. For students oppressed and exploited under capitalism, I believe it can also be said that they have turned around to become masters of their own fate—transforming from slaves who obeyed the bourgeoisie into masters of their own destiny and successors to the revolution.
And your so-called “selecting loyal slaves who can bring benefits to society” sounds somewhat idealist—it seems to suggest that society is a mysterious power detached from people, as if this mysterious force controls people and education is a manifestation of this force, binding and dominating people to continually support and strengthen a certain social form. This is precisely the same as the Western Marxist idea that “capitalists are also alienated by capital.” In capitalist society, only the children of workers and peasants are oppressed and enslaved by the capitalist education system, while the children of the bourgeoisie often live extremely luxurious and decadent lives. According to my middle school history teacher, the son of the mayor of Shijiazhuang merely has a name in a public middle school but actually attends private one-on-one tutoring every day. As for grades, they are of no importance to the bourgeoisie. A female classmate of mine in high school came from a major bourgeois family—rumor has it her family owns a helicopter. She didn’t need to study at all, sometimes she didn’t want to attend school and just stayed at home indulging herself. She could easily get into her desired university without taking the college entrance exam by bribery. They are absolutely not “loyal slaves,” but descendants of feudal lords who bind and oppress the Chinese people.
This is also a nonsensical statement. If we take the original meaning of exploitation—forced possession of others’ labor—students are not exploited. Then this sentence becomes empty talk.
Another problem is, what does “the conflicts within it are fundamentally different from those in society” mean? What are the conflicts in society referring to?
The reason why students’ struggles and their influence are much smaller than those of workers’ strikes and peasant uprisings is primarily because students, as petty-bourgeoisie, are not the two main classes of capitalist society. Without proletarian leadership, this class tends to be powerless, weak, selfish, and conservative. Naturally, struggle against the bourgeoisie often does not achieve significant results.
Moreover, if we interpret “exploitation” here as the suffering students endure, it still makes no sense. In fact, it might even slander students. The suffering of Chinese students today is considered very severe worldwide. There are increasing numbers of internet addiction schools, open and widespread, constant bullying on campuses, and an increase in cases of molestation and rape of minors, along with teachers verbally abusing and physically punishing students everywhere. A few days ago, I chatted with some comrades still in school on a forum, and we all lamented that school life is barely livable; it’s almost like a prison.
Aren’t these sufferings profound enough? Are students’ movements not vigorous because their lives are not hard enough? That is just a variant of “the poorer, the more revolutionary,” with no basis whatsoever. The reason students are like this is partly because they are petty-bourgeois, but they differ from small producers in society—they are weaker because they are parasitic on their families, lacking independent economic status, and thus cannot have any political standing. They usually have to obey their parents and teachers. Furthermore, today’s Chinese government openly protects the Confucian system through laws and military police. To change their own circumstances, students must unite with the broad working masses; otherwise, they cannot produce significant influence.
This also makes little sense. If value is interpreted as grades, then this sentence can only mean that students’ stratification is determined by grades, which in turn influences teachers’ attitudes toward students. This simple truth appearing in such an article is strange; why would someone use such incomprehensible language to express an obvious fact? Moreover, what exactly determines students’ grades is not explained—perhaps it is scored points?
As we have analyzed above, the author himself lacks a correct understanding of capitalist society, political economy, various classes, and student groups. As a result, these two statements have become abstract empty words with no practical meaning.
At the same time, I believe that the content of this outline is fundamentally mistaken. It does not stand from the perspective of Marxism or the people but instead offers a vulgar critique of the capitalist education system from a petty-bourgeois perspective. Many parts reveal the petty-bourgeois’ shortsightedness and selfishness, such as confusing students with child workers, equating student oppression with worker exploitation, and trying to color students as proletarians to beautify the surface. Also, it excessively emphasizes the so-called “privatization of educational resources.” With such a stance, only erroneous conclusions can be drawn.
I would like to express my views on the issue of同志. Some students drop out, some enter factories… Of course, the dominant factors in this may be related to oneself. But setting aside individual cases and looking at it from a general perspective, I think this is a form of escape.
Why do I say this? We can struggle in school, and we can also struggle in factories. But the environments of these two places are different in difficulty. Students understand education, workers understand production. Is it possible for students to understand production now, and for workers to understand learning, to be achieved overnight? For students, they can gain experience in struggle in school and gradually experience this process. Additionally, they rely on various sources of support, which are indeed relatively simpler. When we struggle in school, teachers would rather see us leave immediately; to some extent, these two sides are in opposition. Is it correct for us now to meet the needs of the opposing sides?
Uh, what does the Old Ninth mean?
Comrade’s words are very strange, “he” becomes the “proletariat”, can people become a class?
Don’t the proletariat have fantasies? Have they never experienced… life?
Are all thoughts enlightened?
It must be clear that not all workers can be regarded as members of the proletariat, and not all students are necessarily petty bourgeoisie.
My view is: students do not necessarily have to become proletarians. It is also not enough just to become workers; in other words: in all trades and industries, a united front can be formed. I am even considering that within the bourgeoisie, a united front can also be established, and some among them have progressive ideas. On this point, I have no doubt. Comrade’s first statement is too absolute.
The scope of the word “education” must be incompatible with the scope of the word “society.” You can look up the meanings of these two words, although it might be quite difficult.
It is necessary to clarify this chain: bourgeois education serves bourgeois society; bourgeois society serves bourgeois rule. Do the rulers not rule society?
It should be clear this chain: bourgeois education serves the bourgeois society, and bourgeois society serves bourgeois rule. If society does not serve the ruling class, then that society is not bourgeois society.
Your point is simply that you don’t want to go to work, speaking in such roundabout terms.
If you want to participate in a revolution, you must first struggle against the bourgeois ideas within yourself, removing the ideas of gluttony, laziness, and cowardice. The practice determines the thinking; to eliminate bourgeois ideas, you must labor with a plan and earn equal pay with the working people. No one can develop revolutionary thoughts without ideological struggle and labor reform.
Comrade, hello, and thank you for your hard work. Regarding your reply, I truly cannot refute it.
The value I understand refers to the contribution of one subject to another; this contribution is diverse (which seems to be the nature of value in philosophy). Taking this article of yours as an example, it has an extraordinary contribution to me, in other words, it has an extraordinary value to me. That should be no problem, right?
But actually, I don’t need to tell you these words because you have elevated this outline to the highest level of thought, which I can only aspire to but cannot reach.
The society you refer to should be understood as the capitalist relations of production; the economic base is the sum of these relations. The ‘rule’ you mention should also refer to the superstructure, primarily politics. Certainly, the precision of your word choice and expression can be improved.
What value did you create by speculating and doing questions there, and how much could that test paper you wrote for the college entrance examination sell for?
Your reply is quite strange. In the first sentence, you said that the terms “education” and “society” are incompatible categories, but then you mentioned that bourgeois education serves bourgeois society. Isn’t that a contradiction? If they are two incompatible categories, why would they be connected? Why is “education” also included within “society”? Moreover, there is a very famous saying in the People’s Daily: “The essence of education is the reproduction of class,” which clearly shows that education is one of the social service sectors. So, what reason do you have to claim that these two terms are incompatible categories?
Bei Xi and Qian Ren are two people, but Qian Ren is not Bei Xi. Bei Xi replied to Qian Ren’s message, which is not a contradiction.
But I seem to have confused the words ‘category’ and ‘concept’.
