Transforming the function of motherhood is, as we shall see, a gigantic social undertaking. It can be achieved only by overthrowing existing parent - child relationships, destroying parental authority and the myth of adult infallibility. It requires the whole of society to be deeply conscious of the decisive importance of this transformation for the liberation of women and the future of the revolution. The first step must be to relieve mothers of the continuous care of small children - and, of course, there is even less chance than usual of dealing with this problem without the willing participation of women themselves.
Crèches are by no means unknown in France. Indeed they are becoming more common daily, but there are still far too few of them. The bourgeoisie constantly impedes the development of collective child care for the sake of what it hypocritically calls 'home crèches'. Home crèches are nothing but child-minders - supposedly state-registered nannies who look after several children in their own homes. The government is firmly opposed to crèches' becoming the universal mode of socialized child-rearing. Crèches are too expensive for the State or bosses to run, of course, but the main objection is that they're a bit too collective. In the long run, crèches pose a threat to the power and the structure of the bourgeois family. The child-minding solution, however, provides all the required guarantees. The nuclear family comes out of it strengthened, for the child-minder merely acts as a mother substitute and the type of relationship the child is involved in remains essentially familial. Even though the 'family' charges, it's still one woman, one home, one or more children.
The crèche represents considerable progress in structural terms. Crèches set up in capitalist societies are in some ways blueprints for a radical change which can develop fully only under socialism. And yet because their aim is not to promote women's emancipation or to liberate children, the crèches in France today are highly contradictory. That explains why surveys show that the great majority of women who would like their children to go to crèches, or whose children actually are in crèches, admit that they chose this solution only because it was materially impossible for them to look after their children themselves. These women add, without hesitation, that if they could do so, they would rather look after the children themselves.
How are we to understand this ambivalence? It is, to some extent, the result of women's feelings about work in capitalist societies, which I've already gone into. No doubt it also derives in part from the persistent belief that a mother is irreplaceable and that her role is a natural one; that it is a woman's duty to bring up her infant children herself; and that any other kind of child care is acceptable only if it respects and protects the privileged mother child relationship. In fact, despite appearances, the ideas and values that crèches espouse do not threaten the mother--child relationship under capitalism in any way. Child-rearing methods and content actually aim to preserve and improve this relationship. But women's mistrust of creches may perhaps be fundamentally correct, after all.
French crèches, at present, are not in any way run by the parents. As with a school, you leave your child at the crèche in the morning, you pick him or her up in the evening, and you have no say over what goes on in between. It is inevitable that crèches seem beyond the pale of experience, like foreign and hostile territory.
It's difficult to accept with a light heart that your children will be subjected from infancy to a discipline designed solely to train them to submit docilely and in fear to authority and its use of favouritism. Since secondary-school pupils have started to speak out and revolutionary teachers have lucidly denounced the role of the school, no one can remain unaware that school is repressive. Perhaps we are less aware of the extent to which repression operates, often covertly, in kindergartens, and even in crèches.
Women's mistrust of crèches is only strengthened by the fact that children are cared for exclusively by specialists. Everything conspires to blame the mother for handing over her alleged duty (and her child) to the care of strangers, who are then granted all rights and knowledge with respect to the child. How can the mother who has to leave her child with these experts avoid feeling guilty at what she is told is a betrayal of her maternal role? All this only means more confusion for the mother, who is confronted by the virtual disappearance of mothering traditions from contemporary society. The conditions of everyday life in industrial, urbanized countries are such that a couple's first child is, in all probability, the first child they've ever bathed, dressed and fed. Experienced grandmothers are no longer around to show them how. The distressed and guilty mother ('Is it normal that I shouldn't know how to cope?' 'How do others do it?' 'There's something wrong with me, I'm not a good mother, not a real mother' and so on) usually has no one to turn to but those experts in mothering. The surprised, confused mother then discovers that everything she is doing is totally worthless, old-fashioned and even harmful, and that only properly qualified people know what's good for the child and what isn't. Thus she's never given a chance to extract tried and tested methods of child-rearing from accumulated practical experience of women in this area. And, conversely, she is also prevented from struggling against what really is wrong and old-fashioned.
Everyone knows his or her position and keeps to his or her place. The distraught and guilty mother is forced to desert her child, while the qualified nanny, upholding her status as an expert, is obliged to denigrate the parents and condemn the way they're bringing up their children.
The instructresses at the crèche my little girl used to attend insisted that children shouldn't be potty-trained before they were fifteen to eighteen months old. They thought that premature toilet-training would inevitably lead to a relapse later on. They also wanted to avoid those painful scenes with eight-month-old babies sitting hunched over their pots, their bottoms marked with a red circle when they're lifted off. But this decision was taken without consulting the mothers, who felt that they were still competent in this of all areas, and it provoked incessant bickering, the mothers arguing, 'Well, at home she goes on the pot', while the instructresses reply: 'Never mind that, we don't make them go at the crèche.' There's an implicit plea in the mother's argument: 'I know I'm deserting my child, but allow me at least a little control over him. Don't submerge me completely in the expertise I know you have. Leave me some say in my child's development.'
The argument is an expression of the mother's feeling that she, more than anyone else, knows what's best for her child in at least one sphere. The mothers are kept in such complete ignorance of what their children do all day at the crèche and of the most basic aspects of their development that they feel bitter about even this enforced submission to the professional expertise of others, minor though it is.
Our society constantly and inescapably blackmails the mother who hands her child over to others. It remains true to the principle of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. The mother is offered freedom from time-consuming tasks by Heinz and Mothercare, but at the same time she is blamed for not caring for her own child.
A woman's rights and duties are confused in a society which proclaims left, right and centre that no one can truly take the place of' the child's mother. In sending her child to a crèche the mother is bound to feel guilty, with only the fact that she 'couldn't really do anything else' as a mitigating plea. Making mothers feel guilty keeps them in a state of submissiveness and ideological dependence, appropriate to the bourgeoisie's ends. Conditioned with such marvelous ingenuity and such subtle repression, mothers become a party to the child-rearing process the bourgeoisie demands. Not only does the mother bring up her child in the way that society requires, but society itself educates the mother through her child.
The child is a means by which pressure is exerted to mould a woman into the required and pre-determined shape of a mother. The child doesn't deliberately oppress his or her mother, it's more complicated than that. The child becomes the symbol and prop for all kinds of dreams, wishes and myths which subject the woman to her 'call to martyrdom'. The child is the continuation of the family line; he or she is the tribute she owes her husband; the hope of a successful and meaningful life that she has never experienced. The child helps her accept the petty and humble existence which goes no further than her own front door. The child is the meaning of her life. But this subordination to her child isn't without its compensations. According to the bourgeois ideology, the mother's sacred duties entitle her to certain moral rights. Everything follows the proper rules of the market. Without knowing it, she forces her child to pay dearly for the nights she spent at his bedside nursing him when he was ill. She needs him to be totally dependent on her. She smothers, mutilates and paralyses him. In order to appease her desire to give herself, she creates in the child an overwhelming need for tenderness. She allows herself to confine her child's life within the boundaries of the love that only her presence can satisfy. Who is the more miserable on the first day of school, the sobbing child or the mother, upset and yet fulfilled by the despair of the panicking child?
In our experience crèches have done nothing to change this reciprocally cruel and repressive behaviour. At least we could have hoped that mothers would be freed from their material servitude! But even from this most basic of angles crèches haven't been a stunning success.
The organizational failings of crèche are well known. They open too late and close too early, which often forces mothers to juggle with their daily routine or make complicated arrangements, so that, for example, the child can be handed from one person to another before the crèche opens. Crèches refuse to look after sick children, forcing mothers to miss work to nurse their child. If the crèche administration was really concerned to meet the needs of all the people, and of women in particular, a few rooms could easily be left aside for sick children. Women will always be reluctant to hand their children over to collective care as long as crèches continue to be more like a left-luggage office for unwieldy parcels. And our crèches are certainly not places where women can find a way to give society the benefit of their ideas and experience; nor can they be a base for women's own fight against mistaken and reactionary ideas, which also stem from the narrow and selfish nuclear family. If the act of handing children over to group care is to stop causing so much heartbreak, it is particularly important for women to feel that there is some other meaning to their lives than having children - in other words, ultimately they must be integrated into society. Only crèches where mothers could embark on the whole spectrum of revolutionary tasks, set up and organized by themselves, could become places where children are truly socialized. This is possible only to the extent that the initiative taken by women implies that children are no longer the be-all and end-all of their lives and that they wish to fulfil their revolutionary potential - which is to say that they challenge their own limitations and question the traditional repression of children.
The Soviet Union of the twenties, starting from the desire to liberate women from the 'bother' of children but failing to grasp the true importance of the issue, reproduced on a large scale the very faults which characterize capitalist state child-rearing. Shortly after the revolution, Lilina Zinoviev declared: 'We must rescue these children from the nefarious influence of family life. In other words, we must nationalise them. They will be taught the ABC's of communism and later become true communists. Our task now is to oblige the mother to give her children to US - to the Soviet State.' [1] This idea was taken up in Kollontai's formulation: 'Children are the State's concern.' She added: 'The social obligation of motherhood consists primarily in producing a healthy and fit-for-life child . . . Her second obligation . . . is to feed the baby at her own breast. Only after having done this has the woman . . . the right to say that her social obligation towards the child is fulfilled.' [2] One can imagine how this programme could trigger a reaction in the people. Besides the insufferable implications of the enforced separation of mothers from children, it is reactionary in its arrogant presumptions about women. As with bourgeois attitudes, women are considered to be good for nothing but producing children - and probably only good for that until some alternative can be found, just as bottle-feeding can effectively eliminate breast-feeding. They are considered to have no claim on a child's upbringing - that is held to be the province of pedagogues. Women are no longer harangued in the traditional formula of 'Back to your stove, woman!' Now it's become: 'Back to your blast furnace, woman!' In both cases it means the same: 'Shut up, you know nothing about child-rearing. You must stick to the role that society has prepared for you and allotted to you. Let society - that is, the State - decide for you what is or isn't the right method.'
It is sad to realize that such reactionary ideas and such contempt for women
are still commonplace in several revolutionary organizations which, despite
their many differences, have one thing in common: they all dismiss women's
political strength, at best considering it in the dim light of unconnected
fragments of speeches at the Third International, mouthed without any thought.
But it is even more sickening to come up against such 'male chauvinism' from
the pen of one of the women who has most influenced the new women's movement,
Kate Millett, when she writes: 'The care of children, even from the period
when their cognitive powers first emerge, is infinitely better left to the
best trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation,
rather than to harried and all too frequently unhappy persons with
little time nor taste for the work of educating minds, however young
or beloved.' [3]
Chinese crèches are the product of an entirely different way of rooking at things: as Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, said, arguing against both the theory that children are their parents' properly, and the theory that they are the State's: 'Children belong neither to their parents, nor to the State, but to themselves', since the State is destined to wither away under communism. It is the whole of society and each of its members, and not the State, that has duties to children. We are all responsible for their physical, intellectual, moral and ideological upbringing.
In China there are crèches in work areas as well as in residential areas; the former are specially intended for unweaned babies, whose mothers come and breast-feed them several times a day. Time spent breast-feeding is counted as work time and is therefore not deducted from their wages. These crèches have, in addition, a political value of even greater importance: bringing children to the work areas, where they can be seen by all the workers, is to say: 'Here are the children we have produced together, for whom we are all responsible. Normally you don't see them. You probably imagine that they get fed, washed, dressed and taken care of by some magic trick without anyone having to look after them. Well, wake up, open your eyes! They are here! What are we all going to do about them?' The women's committee of the factory decide that a crèche must be built right here, and that the men and women will put it up for the children after work. And there, too, men are re-educated. There, too, they learn about the many problems involved in child care. The men finally 'recognize' the children, no longer just as their legal responsibility, as men do in the West, but as complete beings. This means that they fulfil a social responsibility to the children's moral, emotional and political welfare, as well as caring for their bodily needs. Undoubtedly the massive influx of men as crèche 'nurses', which is bound to happen very soon, will lead to profound and positive changes in child-rearing itself, as well as in men's ideas.
The district crèches are usually both crèches for weaned babies (who therefore no longer need to be close to their mothers) and kindergartens for children up to six or seven years old. The staff are still mostly women, a large number of them former housewives. We were told that there are special training schools for nursery workers. But it seemed that these schools were being reformed during our trip so we weren't able to visit them. Apart from these schools, great importance is attached to teacher training and to the exchange of national and regional experiences between creche workers. Frequent surveys conducted by crèche workers in the neighbourhoods, the factories and the countryside also play an important part in the analysis of experiences gained in the creches and in enabling appropriate adjustments to be made on the advice of the masses.
Running the crèches is the joint responsibility of crèche workers elected by the staff, parents who use the crèche, delegate workers from the factory and retired workers. Some of the women who look after the children have had special medical training.
With this type of arrangement it's easy for the masses to control the socialization of young children. New methods of child-rearing can be worked out collectively, and the crèche is not the province of specialists.
The crèches are open every day on a twenty-four-hour basis, so that parents who wish to can participate in cultural, artistic or political activities after work. This facility is only for infants, or for those who have no older brothers or sisters to help look after them at home. As soon as a child is a little older, at about two, he or she is more likely to go home every evening. It's also possible for parents to take their baby home in the evening, but leave him or her at the crèche when they want to go out. Finally, since a lot of factories operate day and night, parents can leave their baby there at night and have him or her for a few hours during the day.
Factory crèches are free. Those in the residential district are paid for partly by the factory where the parents work, partly by the neighbourhood's collective fund. The parents' share of the cost is very small.
We spent a day with the children in a crèche at a kindergarten in a neighbourhood in Shanghai.
The setting was very simple, with single-storey buildings. There were pot plants beneath the windows and a large playground in front. When we arrived, at about nine in the morning, it was still quite cold in spite of brilliant sunshine. But the kids were outside, wearing little pinafores (boys as well as girls) over several layers of woollies, making them look like round balls. They were waiting for us with a drum, cymbals, tambourines and paper flowers - a row of noisy, singing and very happy children. We split up into four groups of three, to visit the different parts of the crèche. I went with Edith and Danièle into a room where boys and girls aged three or four were seated round small circular tables, having a domestic science lesson. They were learning how to do the washing up. We would never have imagined that a little boy would know how to scour a bowl skilfully with sponge and powder. The young teacher was watching then. While talking to them, she helped one boy who was having a lot of trouble drying up. Now we could imagine these children really taking part in the washing up at home, without the panicking mother's cries of: 'Be careful, you're going to break that glass!', which end up by paralysing them.
Could you imagine little children in our society actually helping their teachers in their work? At the most they are asked to fold their napkins and put them in their holders. All this made Edith and I think about how often we don't let our children do something because they cause more damage helping than their help is really worth. I wonder if my attitude doesn't reveal an underlying wish to prove to my kids that 'mother knows best', that 'you can't manage without her', that they really need me. Edith reminded me of the day during our last holiday when the 'big ones' (nine years old) had decided to prepare breakfast the younger ones. I had agreed, but I kept on nagging them all the time, saying again and again: 'You're using too much chocolate, don't forget the sugar, the milk isn't hot enough'. I had no confidence in them, so it was hardly surprising that they couldn't stand it, and after a few days resigned themselves to my doing everything for them. Basically, I was proving that I was right.
What took our breath away watching the washing-up 'lesson' wasn't that the smallest children were being asked to do something useful, but that they were doing it so perfectly. It makes you think. Someone took the trouble to show them and to teach them; someone considered the usefulness of that kind of work for very young children, and the children understood it very well. They knew how to do it collectively, the boys were as involved as the girls and it was becoming as natural to them as eating and sleeping. These youngsters come to the table knowing that the meal has had to be prepared, that the table has had to be laid and that afterwards the dishes will have to be washed and put away. They are not just hungry, they are responsible. At the end of the day we had a long discussion with the teachers and the older children (all of five years old). They explained to us that they saw the upbringing of the younger ones as a process in two stages, dialectically linked. The first stage consists of teaching them to acquire personal autonomy as quickly and completely as possible: learning to eat by themselves, to wash themselves, to get dressed, to do as much as possible without the help of adults. Then the emphasis is put on collective education: learning to do together things for everyone making beds, washing up, doing housework and so on. Of course the two stages are closely connected. How can you ask a child to clean other people's shoes when he or she doesn't know how to put his or her own shoes on? If you do it will seem like a punishment.
What is so amazing is that the work of the youngest children is not treated as a pastime (it's not to occupy them) nor even as trivial help to adults - 'Go and fetch me this! Pass me this! Hold this for me!' - which doesn't give them a complete job to carry out from beginning to end, and which really means that they are being treated as semi-skilled workers, made to do things they can't fully grasp, and reduced to carrying out our orders as subordinates. Even for the very young ones the aim must be to give them full responsibility for one or more useful tasks, even if five or six of them take more time to do it at first than a single adult would. What is at stake isn't the immediate productivity of the work, but what children can learn from it.
At a people's commune we had previously visited we had noticed the same concern in the crèche to let the youngest children carry out simple tasks on their own, both looking after the crèche and working in the fields with the peasants. There was a vegetable garden cultivated by the teachers and the children up to seven. Everyone worked there, and of course their ages were taken into account: the youngest ones watered, the older ones dug - maybe only a few square meters each - others sowed and yet others weeded or spread the necessary fertilizers.
A good number of the vegetables eaten by the children at the crèche are products of their own labour. At harvest time they organize themselves into small teams and the revolutionary committee of the brigade gives them jobs like gleaning or spreading the grain on the concrete threshing-poor to dry in the sun. There seemed to us to be many different links between the adults of the village and the children. This is not peculiar to the countryside; in the cities, too, the children in the crèches are organized, from the youngest age and without sex distinctions, to do useful little jobs in their neighbourhoods. Children in kindergartens begin to take part in social production from the age of three or four. For example we saw children seated round long low tables, helped by their teachers, folding the little cardboard boxes used to pack the medicines manufactured in a nearby factory. Obviously they don't spend much time doing this each week and their productivity is low, but how proud they are when they set off in close formation, the red flag leading the way, to deliver their products to the factory workers!
Outside these activities, the emphasis for the three to seven-year-olds is on music, dancing, gymnastics and lessons in history and the class struggle. We went to a history lesson for children of five to six in a Shanghai kindergarten. The children sat round the teacher. There were posters on the wall of a little boy of about twelve, in rags and alone in a forest. The teacher told the story of little Chang, the son of poor peasants, during the war against the Japanese. The suffering inflicted by feudal lords and the humiliation suffered by the Chinese people at the hands of the Japanese imperialists make little Chang, whose parents have been murdered by the local tyrant's men, want to join the People's Liberation Army. The young woman stops her story and asks the children what obstacles Chang will meet on his journey. A little girl replies:
'The cold.'
'Quite right,' says the teacher. 'Little Chang will be cold at night. What will he do?'
'Try to find a blanket, or a bag to wrap himself in,' a little boy suggests.
'Build himself a shack in the woods,' suggests another.
'Make a fire,' says a little girl.
'No, that might attract the attention of the enemy.' So they all agree on a bag.
'What other hardships will little Chang encounter?'
'Hunger.'
'He's taken food with him,' says a little boy.
A little girl disagrees: 'First of all, there's nothing to eat in the village, so he can't take any food with him, and then because he'll have to walk a lot, he can't carry anything heavy.'
Everyone agrees. He may take a few sweet potatoes, but he'll have to rely on the local resources - roots and berries. So he must know how to recognize them.
'Exactly,' says the teacher. 'He knows all about them, because poor peasants were often reduced to eating wild plants when they were starving. Anyway,' she adds, 'you know some of these roots, too. Old Granny Ma brought you some the other day. But what other difficulties will Chang encounter?'
'Enemies.'
'So what will he do?'
'Think about the sufferings of his family and of his village to give himself courage. Remember that millions of peasants have already fought the enemies and liberated themselves. They seem terrifying, but really it's they who fear the poor peasants.'
'But,' another little boy adds, 'he'll have to be careful not to be noticed, and have a story ready, in case someone asks him who he is and where he's going.'
The young woman is pleased with these answers. Chang's adventures will be continued another day.
There are no fairy-tales, no stories 'just for children' and no 'wonderful world of childhood', only the right and proper inheritance that the world as it is offers children. This reminds me of a little Vietnamese child we had seen in a report about North Vietnam on television. We saw kids doing military training, learning to take the pin out of a grenade, organizing themselves to move into shelters without panic and so on. The reporter had asked 'But do you think all this military training is a suitable occupation for children?' The child replied, 'Do you think American bombs spare children? Do you think children can remain outside the war, when the whole population is being attacked? No! So it's right that the children should be prepared, and should learn to resist the aggressors.' It would be criminal not to teach them what they need to know to survive, to defend themselves, to resist.
A mother's duties don't stop when her job as wet-nurse is over. All mothers know that having children doesn't only involve extra work and the time it takes -- it also creates worry. Worry about their health and worry about how to bring them up. Most parents hope that their child will keep up with school work, that he or she will be a good pupil, maybe even the best in the class. The mother is willing to make great sacrifices for her child to achieve such success. She'll promise a reward if he gets good marks, she'll nag him to work, make him recite lessons fifteen times over and all because what they teach at school is competition, rivalry and individualism. Children are told; 'Go ahead! And may the best one win!' But the race is a sham. The odds are fixed long before the start. Working-class children have a different course to run from middle-class children. A tiny percentage apart, at the end of his schooling the beggar is back in the hedgerow and the working-class child is no further on than when he started. These children will be thrown on to the labour market just like their fathers, having learnt two important things at school: to mistrust one another, and that survival depends on craftiness and cunning.
Because of the dominant ethic of individualism, the working-class family (and especially the mother) can do no more than see that the child is handicapped as little as possible. The mother finds herself trapped in a contradictory situation which is a prominent feature of the feminine condition. On the one hand she owes a duty to her husband - she must look after him and take particular care that when he comes home from work he doesn't have to worry about the children and is disturbed as little as possible. In order to do that she has to instil into the children respect for their father's right to peace and relaxation. On the other hand she's a mother, expected to devote herself selflessly and exclusively to her children. It goes without saying that a woman, and especially a poor woman, is never released from these two conflicting commitments. And of the demands made on her, the more immediate imperative prevails: the mother will if necessary send her children out to play in the street, so that her husband can rest. But in so doing she becomes ever more convinced that she is personally responsible for her children's failures.
Schools under capitalism have not freed the family from their responsibility to rear their children; they have corrupted that responsibility. It has become one which the family are not responsible for, in which they can't intervene because the education system has the last word anyway. It has become a 'divine curse' and nothing can be done about it.
The school is the final arbiter of worthwhile knowledge. Any experience that children, or for that matter their parents, may have gleaned outside the school is either suspect or is simply declared worthless: 'Nowadays, as a result of industrial development, working conditions have changed. Now, houses are built with cranes, coal is extracted with mechanical shovels, the worker no longer relies on brute force to accomplish his tasks. The machine does the work, and the worker controls the machine as a pilot controls his aeroplane . . .' The child of a semi-skilled worker to whom these lines are given as a dictation can only agree. He has never set foot in a factory, and if father speaks in an entirely different tone about 'industrial development', describing a world of quotas, stultifying work, authority and revolt, then father's judgement must be partial and inaccurate, since he is neither able nor entitled to challenge the veracity of the school lesson!
As long as studying is kept as a process apart from the rest of life, it will fail to affect society fundamentally. Children are taught to think that something is true because the books say it is, just as later on something will be true because the papers say it is. It is an important facet of our education system, to discredit thoroughly and lastingly all ideas that children or any of us might gain from lived experience, from the class struggle or from our position within society. The primary function of schools in capitalist societies is to deny that any knowledge can be found outside them. If a school lesson does happen to touch on a reality experienced by the children, that only goes to show that the reality couldn't be otherwise. I he child who is used to seeing his or her mother in the role of family servant will learn at school that this is in the natural order of things and that nothing must change it. We can all remember the kind of dictations which allotted us our sex roles:
Geneviève's mother was seriously ill last month and she is still convalescing. She's too weak to take as much care of the house as she used to. Mothers do such a lot of work round the house! Nobody quite realizes it until she is no longer around, or until she is ill.
How can we get Daddy off to work as usual?What do we have to do to make sure Geneviève gets off to school without worrying?
Luckily, big sister Monique is there. I Last year she was still at school now she stays at home. Before Daddy leaves for work, you can hear Monique's slippers quietly shuffling on the wooden floor. The taps are running, the gas is lit: you can hear the noise of the crockery she's washing up and smell the delicious breakfast she's preparing...
In the afternoon, she [Monique] takes a course in shorthand-typing; and in the evening, after helping Mother and supervising Geneviève's homework, she sometimes has to stay up to do her own work.
Despite all this, she is always cheerful. When she comes home from fetching her little sister from school, it's to her that Genevieve tells her small joys and confides her little worries.
For her, Monique is a little mother.
Comprehension
1. When Mother fell ill, who took her place? What does big sister do in the house?
2. Have you got an older sister? Does she help Mother? Does she help you when Mother is too busy?
3. You may have a little brother or a little sister of your own. What do you do to help your mother with her work?
Conclusion
Big sister helps Mother and sometimes takes her place.
[1]
By preventing children from using anything they might learn from daily practical experience, the education system in the West plays an important part in hindering their progress towards independence. It seeks first to cripple people and then to hand them the crutches of bourgeois values. The bourgeois school says: 'You've got bad eyesight. Here you are! Take these glasses!', and offers spectacles which only divert the people's gaze from their class experience, making them focus on an artificial world which, while resembling real life, is completely faked, signifying only the meanings imposed by the bourgeoisie. The education system chains children to their school desks and thus fundamentally directs its aim at the 'infantilization' of the future proletariat (to use an expression coined by Baudelot and Establet). [2]
As long as children remain minors, women will be oppressed. A new education system must aim to make children responsible and independent at all levels and from the earliest age. We must turn children into adults--or rather, we must radically reconstruct the distinction between 'adults' and infantile 'minors' - and thus liberate women from their roles of guardian and child-minder. Women's liberation requires a new conception of child-rearing, based on an equal relationship between adults and children which will allow the children to participate fully in all social activities. The creation of a new education system will obviously be a determining factor in transforming this relationship, and consequently a crucial one in the emancipation of women. The struggle for such a revolution in education is therefore in no way a digression from issues which affect women more closely.
To liberate the mother from the child is first of all to liberate the child. And that means transforming schools. Schools must be open to society and must use it like any other study material. They must create a network of multiple and reciprocal links with all manner of social activities. That is the basis of revolutionary schooling.
The students in a Nanking primary school told us about their approach to work and leisure: 'Each class regularly sets up work schedules after liaising with the neighborhood. After discussion, we decide what jobs we'll take on. For instance our class has taken full responsibility for cleaning up several streets in the neighbourhood, and for education campaigns to teach the people about preventing illness. We appoint teams of students to carry out these tasks after school. There are also short-term plans. For example, we help the neighbourhood work team by doing the housework for a family, or we read and write letters for blind or illiterate people.'
'We practice collective mutual aid,' little Li said. This is no empty phrase. When I asked a little later what the difference was between individual and 'collective' friendships, little Li recounted a story that told us a lot: 'Last year my best friend fell ill. He had to stay away from school for a long time. At first I felt that he shouldn't be left all alone and that I could help him keep up with his school work if I visited him every day. But when I thought about it harder, it occured to me that my friend's illness concerned us all and that this was a good opportunity to develop "collective mutual aid". We then talked about it in class and I suggested that all the pupils should form teams who would take turns to visit him every day and help him work, take care of him, entertain him, tell him about our activities and so on. It was a good idea which helped strengthen our friendship and the unity within our ranks, and also gave greater encouragement to my friend than if I had gone to see him alone.'
'Children's palaces' further illustrate the kinds of relationships that exist between school activities and everyday life. We visited one of these children's palaces in Shanghai. It was in a splendid villa - it really was a palace in fact built for a wealthy British capitalist a long time ago and the children had organized it info a rather special leisure centre. This house hadn't been chosen at random: we were told that the former owner had been waited on by a whole troop of servants and maids, all of whom were children. They had been treated rather worse than dogs! The worker who received us - he ran the centre - had actually been a servant in that house as a child. You can imagine what he felt now when he watched children playing ping-pong in what used to be a stately drawing-room. His job had been to work on the heating in the villa and he hadn't even been allowed into the kitchens. The building is now run by a children's committee and a workers' team, and is, like many of the children's leisure centres in China, shared by several schools. Every day schoolchildren come to it from all over the place.
The most striking thing about it was the prevailing conception of 'leisure'. We saw children playing ping-pong and others flying a remote-controlled model aeroplane they had built themselves, but we also saw children packed into a large hall and listening attentively to a party member reading a paper on the Pakistan question. Many were taking notes. Three children, sitting next to the man on the stage, were helping to lead this symposium. A group of boys and girls in the garden were practicing rifle-shooting under the guidance of a PLA soldier. Watching the serious way they applied themselves lo the task and the accuracy of their shooting we could see that this was no recreation. When the nature of work and school is changed, leisure is transformed as well. There is nothing like 'break' in our schools - because the only purpose of break time is to give children the chance to let off steam, after hours of exhausting and stupid discipline.
When you watch these children playing you understand a great deal about the new social relations. We had a long discussion with some Nanking children about their games. Anne asked them whether there were any games traditionally restricted to boys. The question puzzled them. What kind of games could possibly exclude girls? They really couldn't. understand. 'Play,' they said, 'often has a useful purpose. When we go for walks in the country it gives us a chance to practise our knowledge of medicinal plants, which we gather and bring back to the neighbourhood dispensary. At other times, harvest time for example, we go for walks along the same roads as the brigades take to get to the fields, and we pick up any rice or what has fallen off the carts and bring it back for the peasants.'
We found it hard to tell what was work and what was play in the children's descriptions of their extra-curricular activities - the words have lost their conventional meanings. When you think about it, there's something deeply disturbing about our children's play. It reflects the world we live in, while being an attempt to escape from it. Little Chinese girls and their friends don't play at: 'We'll be married, you come home tired from work and I'll have prepared some food and put the children to bed.' (Edith told me she heard her small daughter say that to her younger brother. ) In China it would probably go more like this: 'There have been torrential rains breaking the dykes, and the crops are in danger of being flooded, and we've got to repair the dykes...', or again, as they told us, 'Practice the people's war in the countryside, learn to take a hill and hold it'.
A parallel can be drawn between children's games and art - they both reflect and act upon society. In capitalist society, the function of play is like the function of art for the masses: it acts as an escape, while at the same time reinforcing the dominant ideology. Children in China also have games which mirror their culture, but they don't pretend to act like 'grown-ups', and they don't try to escape from their childhood condition in their imaginations. They don't have to, because China is their world too, because they're not cut off from any aspect of social reality. Collective child care will not spontaneously reveal a different ideology in the children, one that was previously hidden. It must also integrate children into the society in which they live. The struggle against individualism and private interest can't possibly mean anything to children who live in a society founded on private interest and individualism. If little Jin Hua and little Tse Tang don't come to blows over a toy car, it's because they've never seen adults working their fingers to the bone to get their very own car.
The purpose of the children's palaces has always been to create new links between pupils in different schools and to enable the children to connect the school with areas outside it - especially to allow them to learn about things that aren't taught in school. Children who come to learn modelling techniques in classes given by sculptors will, in turn, teach them to their fellow-pupils. The same applies to singing, dancing, classes in instrumental music, drawing and so on. You teach others what you've learned yourself, even if you aren't fully qualified. And that's a general principle. The children's palace isn't meant to be used simply as a recreation centre, but also to allow children from different schools to meet in one place, giving them the opportunity of getting to know children other than their own school-friends. This is an important factor in broadening social interaction. The children are encouraged to be a sort of 'link' between teaching outside school and school itself. In Nanking they told us how important this had been for the children. We were given one example of a little girl who had been taught the accordion by her uncle. She then taught her comrades the techniques she'd learned. Her uncle lent her his accordion and she would take it to school so that the other children could practice on it under her direction.
There are many more links between school and society. In the school at Nanking we were met by one of the fathers, who joined in a lengthy discussion about the role of parents in the school and outside it. 'In my opinion,' he said, 'parents play a secondary but very important role in education. They participate in the critique of the old education system. When a new school syllabus was introduced in Nanking we had frequent meetings with the teaching staff and the representatives from the workers' team at this school, to decide how we would implement the syllabus. It's important for parents to understand and be familiar with the ideological content of the childrens' education. It enables them to co-operate in their education. No doubt you know that in China each production unit and each workshop has a different day off. Now the teachers ask parents to come to the school from time to time on their rest day. We attend classes so that we can see what the children's attitudes are in class. We also have continuing links with the teaching staff, who visit each pupil's family in turn. The parents, who know their child well, can co-operate with the teacher to help the child overcome any problems. This co-operation is crucial. The parents meet three times a term to discuss the way the school is run, any difficulties that may arise and what needs to be done. But the teachers work mainly with the pupils themselves and with the workers' team to solve problems.'
Another aspect of parent education is teaching by example. To bring up children, parents must continuously re-educate themselves, criticize their own mistakes, and accept that children can teach them some things. This process isn't limited to the family, it's part of a more general need to draw together words and actions, theory and practice. This reminded us of an anecdote that the instructress of a group of three-year-olds had told us when we visited a kindergarten: 'One afternoon during the little ones' rest period I took the opportunity to chat to another teacher. Several children formed a delegation to point out that I was disturbing their rest. They couldn't see why they had been told to keep quiet! In their opinion, they pointed out, 'The rule of silence applies to everybody!".' The instructress added: 'Before that my other comrades used to tease me and would jokingly say: "Lucky you, you must have a cushy job, working with the little ones. You don't get criticized like we do!" I was very happy to be able to prove how wrong they were.'
The educational function of the family must no longer be a pretext for parental dictatorship. Socialist education is the struggle against bourgeois ideology, and the family, individually and as a whole, takes part in this struggle. A mother told us: 'I had begun to study a text of Marx, but it was very difficult and I was losing heart. I had almost decided to give up, thinking it wasn't for me, and that at my age 1 wasn't capable of getting down to serious study. My daughter noticed my discouragement, cheered me up, told me 1 ought to carry on and offered to help me. And now we study together twice a week. Thanks to my daughter's help I've been able to further my own education. It's very rewarding for me to feel that.'
Allowing children to become educators doesn't just mean that they can criticize their parents. It involves a recognition of the political role of young people, and what could be better proof that this recognition exists than the way children actually participate in leadership? The revolutionary committees that run the primary schools are made up of teachers' representatives, members of the workers' team and schoolchildren, elected by their fellow-pupils. These schoolchildren take part in all the administrative duties of the revolutionary committee.
The nature of the relationship between teachers and pupils also reveals the importance attached to children's responsibility. It can be seen most clearly in the reform of the control of knowledge. In the first place the 'surprise attack' method has been completely abandoned and the teacher no longer tries to trap pupils. Grading, no longer a final verdict, is discussed by pupils and teachers. Pupils can often use their books and their own notes in examinations. They usually know the questions in advance. The exam is supposed to be a work of reflection and understanding, not a memory test And above all exams have become a dual-purpose test, designed to assess both the children's knowledge and the instructor's teaching. Teachers and pupils periodically examine together the progress of one another's school work criticizing one another during regular classroom meetings. If a teacher makes a mistake, he or she must admit it in public. If pupils are dissatisfied with a teacher's attitude and the teacher persists in his or her mistakes, they can ask the school's revolutionary committee to come and investigate the matter and take the necessary steps. A woman teacher told us; 'This procedure is a comparatively recent innovation, and we haven't had to deal with any cases yet. Classroom meetings are held every three months, but the children can of course make criticisms and suggestions to the teacher in class if necessary. And if they feel that something is seriously wrong they can ask for a general meeting to be held before the scheduled date. The workers' teem attends general meetings and helps to solve problems by giving us the class position.'
Does this mean that schools are run by the pupils? It would be a serious mistake to believe that. There's no sign of infantile demagogy in Chinese educational policy. This is easy to understand. Since the children have only limited experience, they clearly haven't yet got an overall view of society. It is vitally important to extend their experience in every direction as soon as possible, precisely to develop their knowledge, and it is important to understand this essential point fully. 'The education of the younger generation is always in the interest of one class', whether it's the bourgeoisie or the proletariat who educates them. However, children are said to have political responsibility, and not only are they given the right to speak out (including the right to criticize teachers and parents), but critical judgement is encouraged in itself Mao says, 'A communist has a duty to ask himself why.' It is said, 'Children must participate in the leadership', but it is also said that 'Power lies in the hands of the working class, and it is they who educate children!' This is not as contradictory as it seems. Indeed, this question makes everything clear. It is precisely because the proletariat controls education that Chinese children have the sorts of rights and power that we never had and that our own children still haven't got. Paraphrasing Mao, we could say: 'Imperialism has its methods of schooling, we have our own, and these two opposed ways are both functions of our diametrically opposed final goals.' Giving children a voice in their affairs is just one of the ways in which the proletariat can exercise its power.
Because truth is necessarily on the side of the proletariat, it need have no fear of children constantly measuring reality against the theory they are presented with in books and on their teachers' lips. Such confrontations are even invited. Either what teachers, books and the Party say conforms in reality, or reality shows that what they say is wrong. In the first case the children's experience allows them to assimilate true scientific knowledge more thoroughly and to adopt for themselves the proletarian point of view which they are taught. In the second case: 'Thank you, children, the theory you have been taught is not the proletarian point of view, and you are right m reject it'. Let's imagine for a moment that our schools were to be run according lo tile Chinese proletarian model. Children would go into society at large to investigate shanty towns, low-cost housing estates and private residences. They would visit factories to talk to the management, foremen and workers - even to the guards carrying revolvers in their pockets. Workers would come into the classroom to give their version of the latest large scale strike. An immigrant worker would come to talk about his experiences and his ideas about colonialism. The children would be organized, and they would be free to speak out. At the end of a lesson, they might well criticize the teacher. What would be left of absolute respect for teachers, of discipline? What would be left of the capitalist school? Let society be the classroom! But not every class can allow this to happen. Marx has shown that bourgeois ideology is an inverted, mystified reflection of reality, whereas the ideology of the proletariat is scientific and hence really provable. If it's true that the bourgeoisie inculcates its ideology in to our schools (as the proletariat does in its own schools), then we can see why the apparent contradiction we met above was purely subjective and not an objective reality.
This new kind of upbringing and education inevitably results in a severing of the rigid ties by means of which parents and teachers (albeit in different ways) keep children in a state of dependence. The exercise of paternal authority is facilitated in capitalist countries by the family's responsibility in providing materially for the growth and upbringing of the younger generation. This responsibility is sufficiently far-reaching to support the father's authority in all but the comparatively rare eases where the law is called in. All the talk about children's liberation is meaningless until we realize that that material reliance on even one person is the very denial of the possibility of independence. A child who is totally deprived of autonomy can choose only between parents and the street, with all the risks that entails. This situation is not usually criticized because it seems perfectly natural: how could children support themselves? The solution isn't to transform children into wage earners. In China, too, parents assume material responsibility for their children, but in China the responsibility is not theirs exclusively. That's the crucial difference.
Youth centres, like the Shanghai children's palace described earlier, are free of charge. Sporting events, film shows and theatrical performances are all free schoolchildren: either children (all children, it isn't a form of reward) are allowed in without paying, or else schools regularly hand out tickets. Whenever children stay in peoples' communes they become the responsibility of the brigade The socialization of housework means that they don't have to depend, everywhere and at all times, on their mothers for their everyday needs. In short, while parents continue to support their children, society as a whole also takes a large share of the responsibility., Children who never have to limit their studies or their cultural, leisure and sporting activities because of their parents' limited financial resources can be truly independent.
Chinese people say that before the Cultural Revolution their schools were organized on the Russian model, which in turn duplicated the capitalist school. They had marks, punishments, awards, reprimands, teachers' authority - the panoply of props for a classic educational farce. But because the people had already begun to overthrow social relations in some spheres; because the proletariat had overthrown the power of the old exploiting classes; because new moral values based on collectivism had seen the light of day, the educational system was in clear contradiction to the revolution. And wherever the revolutionary forces were firmly in control there was great opposition to the schools - sometimes so much so that workers and peasants would themselves create new schools, to be controlled by the masses.
The first stage of the critique of the old educational system was to reveal its class character. The local and national newspapers of the time are full of articles refuting the classical bourgeois thesis according to which education is simply a neutral technique for communicating neutral knowledge. These articles argue Mao's position that: 'Education is always a response to a class's need for self-perpetuation. The proletariat seeks to transform the world according to its own world outlook, and so does the bourgeoisie. In this respect, the question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is still not really settled.' And so the notion gained currency that educational methods are not simply means of varying efficiency for transmitting universally true knowledge to children, but are, in reality, the political and ideological tools of one class, which has decreed that ideas serving its interests are true for the whole of society. Mao says: 'In schools, all activities aim to transform the students' ideology.' The ideas propagated by slave-owners justified slavery; bourgeois ideas justify capitalism; the ideas communicated by the proletariat are designed to fashion the younger generations' ideology in line with revolutionary values. This destroys at the root the possibility of the proletariat using the methods used in bourgeois schools. Replacing the academic study of bourgeois history textbooks by the academic study of a few Marxist books, even if they are Mao Tse-tung's works, will never enable the proletariat to train those who are to take up the revolutionary cause.
If the proletariat is to educate the younger generation, it must at the very least be allowed to play an active part in education, playing its own part in the political and ideological leadership and acquiring the necessary experience in the field. Until now the members of the proletariat used to go to school only as pupils, never as teachers. Of course working-class children have sometimes become teachers in capitalist countries. But then they ceased to belong to the proletariat. And as the educational system was still controlled by the bourgeoisie, they would become mere cogs in its machinery. It has never been a question of 'proletarianizing' the recruitment of teachers, though this is still a necessary step to take, but rather of ensuring that the working class, which is involved in today's revolutionary struggle, should overthrow the educational system as it now exists, and assume control of education. So it was that in China, during the summer of 1968, groups of workers, elected by their workmates, went into schools to seize power in primary and secondary education. [3]
In the Nanking primary school a woman teacher told us about the visit one of these teams paid to her school: 'It was in the autumn of 1968. Several neighbourhood factories chose a few workers to help to revolutionize teaching. Teachers are at the heart of the contradiction. They have the power in schools, they are absolute rulers, but who are they? The majority have a working-class background, but this certainly does not necessarily make them experts in a new form of education. "What links had we kept with the masses?" That was an awkward question.
'In fact we were cut off from the concerns of the people. Our only object was to make sure that pupils kept up with the curriculum and passed their examinations, but we didn't ask ourselves whether what we taught was useful to the revolution. This atmosphere encouraged children to become bookworms. They were learning so as to get good marks, to pass exams and to move up next year. They were becoming indifferent to politics, to society and to the rest of the world.'
At this point a little boy interrupted the teacher to back her up: 'Before the Cultural Revolution, whenever my mother asked my brother to prepare the meal, or to look after us, because she had to go out to work with other comrades, my brother would answer, 'It's not my job to do that, I've got to get on with my school work. I've got homework to do and if I don't do it I'll get bad marks." My mother would always get angry, "What kind of school is it where children learn to be selfish and to succeed without any concern for the collective good?" '
'Little Li's story,' resumed the teacher, 'shows that we hadn't taken the needs of the masses as a starting-point. Under the pretext of transmitting pure intellectual knowledge, we were in fact imparting a reactionary ideology. How could we presume to form the new generation of revolutionaries while we kept them out of touch with the revolution?'
When Chinese teachers tell us that what was wrong with the old system was that it didn't serve the people, they mean that the educational system wasn't furthering the people's fundamental interest in arming the younger generation with the means of making a materialist critique by linking theory and practice, thus enabling the young to carry the revolution consciously into all areas of life.
In that school in Nanking we probably saw the clearest and most concrete examples of the links being forged between theory and practice, teaching and manual work, school and society, pupils, teachers and the masses. There, as in all other schools, boys and girls between the ages of seven and twelve undergo an important experience. The leader of the revolutionary committee explained that to begin with the new teaching system created since the Cultural Revolution was still at an experimental stage, and that the process of struggle-criticism-reform was still developing. For instance at the end of 1971 there was still no national school syllabus for primary schools.
During the Cultural Revolution the various revolutionary committees of the schools in Nanking drew up a temporary syllabus and wrote their own textbooks based on criticisms of the old educational system formulated by a vast movement of pupils, teachers, parents and workers' teams. The Committee leader told us that it hadn't been decided whether or not to reinstate a national school syllabus using the same textbooks in all schools. That could be dealt with later. The important things now were for large numbers of people, including teachers themselves in the first place, to collaborate to draw up new curricula following the political guidelines laid down during the Cultural Revolution and ensuring that all school-leavers were brought up to the same national educational level.
The curriculum is now divided into five subject areas: politics, literature, arithmetic, physical education and art (drawing and singing). In the two senior classes two new subjects are added: foreign languages (usually English or Russian) and natural science. There is a class specifically devoted to politics, but all the other subjects are politically based. The Chinese lesson, for example, is at the same time a lesson on the history of the revolution, and when the children study grammar, they do so in texts about the Paris Commune or the war against the Japanese.
The country's newspapers have an important part to play too, and are used as school text books. The same approach is evident in arithmetic teaching. Children learn to invent their own problems, starting from the real questions that have to be faced in daily life. Absurd and unreal questions of the 'tap-filling-a-leaking-bath' variety would be greeted by the children with: 'Why let the bath leak instead of repairing it?' And when children calculate how much time is needed to irrigate a field of area X, from a source supplying volume Y of water per minute to Z irrigation canals, they also calculate that this time could be reduced by half if blade-wheels were to be set up at the mouth of the canals to increase the water flow.
I asked one of the children whether they ever disagreed with the policies of the government and what would happen if so. They laughed when my question was translated to them. 'Of course we disagree sometimes. Would you like an example? The boy who answerer was a ten-year-old. 'Well, not long ago there were disagreements about Nixon's visit. 1, for example, felt it was unacceptable that the leading representative of United States imperialism should be allowed to visit our socialist country. Our form mistress suggested that we should carry out some inquiries among children in other classes, our families and other workers to find out what the general opinion was. She also suggested that we should study the global situation more thoroughly to place the question in context. So we spent a lot of our free time debating the question in our families and during public meetings in the neighbourhood. It took some time and some serious study to come to an understanding. Now I agree that Nixon should come.'
'Can you tell us how you justify that?' we asked him.
'Yes. You must understand one thing. It wasn't us who rejected relations with the United States. We have always been prepared to establish relations with all countries on the proper basis. But the United States government, hoping that our revolution would be defeated, set up an economic and political blockade against China. The United States took over Taiwan, a Chinese province, for military reasons, installed Chiang Kai-shek and proclaimed him 'the authentic representative of China'. They gave Taiwan a seat at the United Nations and denied China's existence. Well, now Nixon is coming in person to visit a country that has been crossed off his own world map. That's a victory for a start! And it's mainly due to the defeats that the people of Asia have inflicted on the United States, forcing it to revise some of its attitudes towards us. We are well aware that you have to rely on the people of a country to overthrow its reactionary policies. Establishing relations with the United States will encourage mutual exchange and understanding between our peoples.
'The reactionaries of the world slander China, and want people to believe that she would make war on other countries to impose her own political system on them. Refusing to invite Nixon would deprive us of a means of denying these slanders. Undoubtedly some people will also seize on Nixon's visit here to claim that our government is capable of modifying its attitude towards other peoples' struggles or its support of them. But China's support of world revolutionary struggles has not been due to the refusal of some states to recognize the Chinese government. This support exists because our government is a dictatorship of the proletariat, which places great emphasis on the international proletariat. The fact that some governments are now beginning to re-establish relations with us doesn't change our position in any way. The best way to prove this beyond doubt is to agree to Nixon's visit, since he himself has asked to come. Nations will judge our attitude on the evidence, and this will be the best testimony. And that's why I'm happy for Nixon to come.'
Jenny asked the teacher to explain the principles guiding her in giving lessons in politics. 'We do our best to present all sides of the problem, so that the children can bring more knowledge to bear on the question. We must arm the children, and ourselves, with the tools of analysis and materialist critique. We make sure of allowing those who hold opposite opinions, or those who are hesitant, to express their doubts and criticisms, even if they are in a very small minority and even if their criticisms are totally wrong. This enables the pupils to criticize mistaken points of view and it's instructive for everyone. We must learn to think. We don't want to instil in the younger generation the docile submissiveness that Liu Shao-chi preached. The revolution needs enthusiastic and profound adherence, not just formal consent. The class struggle is all around us. The important thing is to teach children to fight consciously.'
We attended a lesson on the history of the class struggle. The grandfather of one of the pupils came to tell a class of twenty-five children the story of' his childhood and adolescence in the China of yesterday. The old man had begun to tell his story a few minutes before we were taken to sit at the back of the classroom, and even though our visit had aroused quite a bit of curiosity in the school, not one of the pupils budged when we entered. Not a single one of them turned round to glance at us, even furtively. They were completely absorbed by the old man's tale, hanging on his every word and reliving his every experience.
Could such a thing happen in the West? Could an ordinary working man, with little education, come to school in his overalls and tell his story, with the whole class listening in silence, enthralled? He was thin and seemed to have suffered dreadfully; his hands were gnarled, the hands of an old manual worker. He spoke with few gestures and no melodrama. He stood there without embarrassment, but also without the facile pomposity of the professional lecturer. Sometimes he would recall the poverty in which his family and all the people had been kept by the local landowners. At such moments his voice betrayed his anger. And as I listened I thought that people can never stop rebelling against the oppression they have had to suffer, even long after it has ceased. This is, without doubt, a precious legacy handed down by the generation which has borne the worst ills of exploitation and which has risen and destroyed the old order. It is a great revolutionary heritage for the younger generation.
The importance that transmitting the lessons of' the past has for the future can be gauged by the relentless way in which the bourgeoisie has tried, and is still trying, to prevent our people from taking possession of the history of revolutionary struggles - the Paris Commune, for example. What they're doing is defrauding us of our inheritance. Oppressed masses easily identify with these revolutionary struggles of the past, even those that developed long ago and arose out of apparently quite different conditions.
These 'evocations of the past', which play such an important part in China's daily cultural life, are of great significance. They are her history, as told by the people and created by them. They represent a recognition, through the facts, that it is up to the people to judge what is good and what is bad. Furthermore, it is the right of those who have made history themselves to relate it to the young. And that is a most significant way in which the history of the revolution and, essentially, the seizure of power by the poor under the leadership of the working class, becomes a 'national culture' with which the younger generations can identify and which they can turn into a contemporary morality.
The pupils at Nanking put on a show for US. One of the acts was a paylet staged by the children themselves. It was based on the account an old peasant woman had given them of her past life. In one of the scenes the mother - the peasant woman as played by a little girl of about ten - watched her child being dragged away from her by the landowner's bailiffs because she hadn't been able to pay her taxes. The mother fought the bailiffs tooth and nail to get her child back. They threw her brutally on to the ground and she let out a heart-rending scream. At first she wept, but then we saw her switch from despair to hatred. A sense of indignation gradually swept over her and she rose to her feet, dry-eyed, resolute, fierce and indomitable. It was overwhelming, and very much more accessible for US than the opera we saw in Peking. It seemed to us that even if this evocation of the past was used merely to create a cultural tradition, the children related to it with such conviction and warmth that that would make it valuable in itself. What a splendid way to take their revenge for the culture the bourgeoisie imposed on the people, in which they were represented as ignorant, brutish and sheep-like stooges.
Co-education doesn't just mean putting boys and girls together. It must also mean teaching them exactly the same things. And domestic science is one of the most important areas in which to test the reality or otherwise of co-education.
In the Soviet Union the widespread return to the woman-at-home ideology after 1936 soon affected children's upbringing and education. This ideological switch was directly connected to the Soviet regime's need to return to the family its economic function, wherever that had been even marginally destroyed. It straightforwardly accepted that all the economic and ideological functions of the bourgeois family were needed to develop 'society'. The extremely reactionary nature of this return to the earlier family structure is nakedly revealed in the reasons given by the Soviet leadership to justify separate education for boys and girls:
We have taken steps to enable schools to adapt in every respect to the special characteristics of boys and girls. The Soviet State today is faced with important problems, the first of which is how to strengthen the primary unit of society - the family - on the premise that the father and the mother are completely equal as heads of the family but that each has his or her own very clearly defined tasks. Therefore, we must institute a scholarly regime which educates young men to become the fathers of the future, brave warriors for their motherland, and young women to become conscientious mothers, the educators of the next generation. [4] And so boys are called upon to become soldiers, girls to rear future soldiers!
Orlov justified the measure introducing the progressive winding-up of co-education in the 20 August 1943 issue of Izvestia in the following terms: 'In co-education neither the peculiarities of the physical development of boys and girls, nor the different requirements of their vocational training ... can receive proper attention ... It is essential to introduce in girls' schools such additional subjects as pedagogies, needlework, courses in domestic science.' [5] Similarly in April 1945 Timofeev stated in the official Soviet education journal: 'Socialist humanitarianism must take account of the feminine nature. We must maintain women's interest in beautiful objects, flowers, elegant clothes and ornaments.' [6]
Domestic-science classes - the sound of the words was enough to make our hearts sink. Jeanne was reminded of those Wednesday afternoons when the boys left the classroom and the girls took out a little square of white fabric on which they practiced overcasting seams, hemming, open-work or herringbone stitch, waiting for the big day when they would be able to make a child's vest. The immeasurable boredom of those endless afternoons when our coloured thread outlined the grey and monotonous future that awaited us. We could hear the shouts of the boys playing football under our windows, adding insult to injury. They could play games, they were outside in the fresh air, lucky them! But Jeanne was really wrong to despise domestic science. It played a most important part in fermenting our feminine revolt.
In Peking's secondary school no. 26 domestic science classes are very different. Boys and girls perform a variety of services side by side. A shoe-mender's workshop had been set up in a little room and when we visited it children were sitting on stools mending slippers and resoling canvas shoes. They greeted us in silence, although a few moments earlier we'd heard their chattering from the corridor outside. We saw several other workshops for repairing the pupils' clothes. In one a boy of thirteen or fourteen was skilfully sewing a large patch on a trouser seat. [7] In another room children were cutting their friends' hair. Another room was a proper carpentry workshop. Boys and girls went there to repair school equipment, to learn how to make benches and, more generally, to do the sort of odd jobs that crop up every day. Yet another room housed a clinic where the children were using acupuncture to treat one another's minor ailments and learning to recognize medicinal plants and to prepare herbal remedies. The pupils took turns doing these various services, helped by workers or teachers.
Domestic science is not only truly co-educational, it also has immediate practical value. Just think how much a mother can be 'liberated' if her children look alter their own clothes and shoes and take care of their health at school, in other words if they're self-reliant. Once again, that's the extraordinary thing about the Chinese revolution. The mother's work has not been taken over by 'state services', on which the children would be just as dependent. Work which was once the province of the family alone (i.e. of women) has become a collective responsibility, shared by all sectors of society.
But before this result can be achieved a whole world of prejudice has to be overturned the whole gamut of beliefs justifying the division of labour on grounds of natural inequality has to be combated. Old ideas must be uprooted, ideas which attribute innate qualities of initiative and authority to men, and which allow women greater 'sensitivity' only because this makes it easier to deny them any aptitude for intellectual work. Children must be shown that no one is born more suited to intellectual work than manual work, more gifted at housework than at foreign languages. It's a perpetual ideological struggle, and one whose effectiveness in China is based on a system of education that places no restrictions on the spheres of learning and activity that girls may enter. Apprenticeship for the people's war involves children - and girls aren't kept out of it. Like the boys, they are given military training, practice rifle-shooting, run assault courses and learn the rudiments of unarmed combat. In every school and in all activities outside school, children receive military training, handle weapons, organize themselves into platoons and learn to protect themselves and to dig shelters.
All pupils undergo some training in productive work for about a week in every school year, in the workshops built inside the schools by local residents. This has nothing to do with the services I mentioned above. Those workshops have an entirely different purpose.
No attempt is made to give children an abstract or old-fashioned conceptíonof manual work, unlike in France where 'manual work' always refers to craftsmanship - the blacksmith, the mason and the carpenter are still the basic material for dictation and memorized prose passages in primary schools, even though such occupations have almost entirely disappeared. In France the kind of work most people have to do in a modern industrial ocicty is rarely, if ever, mentioned. Assembly lines and quotas are ignored and for good reason. In the few contexts in which they are mentioned, the idea is to paint an abstract picture which is far from innocent.
The popular image of the manual worker is the eighteenth-century journeyman, who has mastered his craft, loves his work and relishes the knowledge that his is a difficult job well done - difficulty no longer implies laboriousness but merely the skilful application of craft.
At the school at Nanking we were told that the workshops had been set up after very close links had been established with a neighbouring lorry-manufacturing plant. The factory workers had come to install some of their machines and had organised a simple labour process but one that would enable the children to carry out some of the operations performed in the factory. The children were making air-filters for the factory.
A woman worker from the factory, a member of the workers' team, worked in these little workshops. She took the children through all the necessary steps and taught them simple techniques, thus enabling them to acquire manual skill very quickly. But in particular she made them realize the importance of collective work, of being united, for the creation of wealth. These small school workshops ('our' workshops they call them) are the sole responsibility of the children, who organize and run them more or less alone, and give them a chance to acquire experience that is different from what they would get by actually going into a factory.
Although the workshops have actual machines from the factory, they involve a relatively small number of operations; the work process is very simple, so that the children are better able to master the work and to grasp its overall meaning. They are therefore also better able to introduce innovations, to invent new procedures and to judge what is good and what needs changing. One of the most important things is to ensure that the child's first contact with productive work isn't a training in blind discipline, but is instead closely linked to the collective exercise of power.
If you look at it more closely it becomes clear that all this is a necessary counterbalance to the rest of school teaching. Even if class work is done collectively and the children help one another instead of jealously guarding their own knowledge, individual learning of reading, writing and arithmetic still prevails. Hence the experience of production, which can only function collectively, is vital if they are to adopt socialist attitudes. The children are getting ready to become, as Marx might have put it, freely associated collective workers.
They would come to the workshops during schoolhours and follow the same rhythm as the other pupils - three forty-five-minute sessions in the morning and two in the afternoon, each one separated by a ten-minute break. The younger children would work in the workshops only in the morning. Jeanine asked the children whether they thought of the workshops as a game. They were deeply shocked by the question: 'Not at all,' replied one of them. 'The question of the workshops is a very important one. How could we ever continue what the workers and peasants have started if our studies were remote from practical work, if we had no concrete knowledge of production and no links with the workers and the peasants? We couldn't!"
Productivity isn't the most important part of this work. Making children work isn't an attempt to capitalize on every available source of labour in society, children included. The work is instructive for the children because it's useful to society; and it's useful to society mainly because it's instructive for the children.
Alongside the workshops are vegetable gardens, which are cultivated by the children all the year round on a team rota system. They provide a high proportion of the vegetables eaten in the canteen. There are vegetable gardens everywhere, even in the heart of the city. Sometimes they even had to dig up the pavements and streets to find the countryside under the cobblestones.
These aren't the only links the children have with social production, however.
The school year proper lasts eight and a half months. When the year is over pupils and teacher spend three weeks in a peoples' commune, to take part in the farm work. They live with peasant families and learn about the conditions of life and work in the country. This gives them an opportunity to swap experiences and broaden their horizons. The peasants, we were told, welcome them warmly and take a great deal of trouble to give them a class education. They have cultural evenings when the city children perform plays for the peasants and vice versa. They are given concrete evidence about the struggles of the past and told about those of the present. The children gain an understanding, 'supported by proof', of the creativity of the peasant masses and of the progress they have led the whole Chinese people to make.
Chinese children are not irresistibly drawn to the cities and after leaving school they are as likely to settle in rural areas as anywhere else. It is fundamental party policy (though those who have a bourgeois conception of industrialization oppose it) not to urbanize China, but to develop industry in the countryside itself using the existing agricultural brigades. Of course carrying out this policy is possible only in so far as the 'country bumpkin' is not an object of contempt socially, and it depends on a clear understanding, especially among children from an early age, of the importance of the peasantry to the revolution and of the need to narrow the gap between town and country.
After their stay in the country, the children often work in a factory for two or three weeks. Obviously, as in the country, they don't do all the jobs an adult does, and their working day isn't as long. But they are there in the workshops, among the workers, and they work beside them. Here again, the acquisition of technical knowledge cannot be separated from the ideological and political training they receive. They take part in the workers' own cultural and political activities. This gives some idea of the esteem in which these children are held. They become, so we are told, apprentices under worker-masters.
Study is emphasized in this work, too. It is not at all a matter of teaching them the tricks of the trade that enable them to perform certain operations without understanding their significance. The purpose of the techniques used is explained to them in detail - why this part must be screwed and that one soldered; how the work done here is only a part of the whole work process, deriving its value and meaning from the collective involvement of others, before and after, in communal production.
The children also have concrete experience of the shortcomings in work processes today. Great care is taken to make them share the interest with which workers approach technological development and to show them how they achieve it through close collaboration with the technicians. The struggle between the two attitudes that pervades the whole question of technological progress is constantly stressed. The children must not suffer from the illusion that the development of productive forces is neutral and politically inconsequential.
Child-rearing and education raise a number of other points. Clearly, child-rearing in China is no longer the exclusive province of the individual family but equally clearly, it is not the province of specialists. The Soviet Unions's experience in this area also offers a contrast that helps us to grasp the full significance of the Chinese experience.
'There is no doubt that the terms "my parents", "our children" will gradually full out of usage, being replaced by such conceptions as "old people", "adults", "children" and "infants". Lunacharsky's comments [1] were intended to support the thesis that children would have to stop being the property of parents and become the property of the State. The question of children is, at bottom, the question of society's future. Do we want to retain our division of labour and the present structure of social roles, or do we want to destroy them? If the latter, how can we hope to do it if childrearing is entirely in the hands of a body of State specialists? That kind of upbringing and education is the best way to cut children off from the real body of society and to fix for ever in their psyche the attitude of the eternal minor, constantly subjected to the tutelage of specialists who always and in all circumstances 'know better' and are 'more competent'. The property relationships between parents and their submissive children must disappear. But there is a wider-ranging underlying social relationship which so to speak, delegates, the guardianship of children to their parents. This doesn't strike only against children, but against all oppressed people. It assigns to children the role of 'minors', deprived of autonomy and of responsibility. This relationship is created by cutting children off from society and keeping them in a world apart, the 'childhood world' of school and family. Lunacharsky's new perspective merely reinforced this relationship.
Although it doesn't seem like it, the question of children is basically that of the State. Socialism, which is the transitional period between capitalism and communism, is precisely the destruction of the old State and the building of a new one, albeit a rather peculiar new State, since its goal is its own eventual disappearance - the State to end all States. It's no surprise, then, that this question is the stumbling block of all possible revisionist falsifications, in this area more than in any other the bourgeoisie, which formerly had a total monopoly within the State, remains strong for, very long time after being overthrown. Even though the bourgeoisie also controlled the factories, it obviously could not stop the workers running them, and therefore knowing them thoroughly.
The Chinese system of child-rearing and education is a striking example of the new type of State whose strength lies in its own ultimate destruction. The proletariat increases its power by means of the direct and effective exercise of leadership over more and more sectors of society, thus destroying the monopoly of the traditional leadership. Because the proletariat has strengthened itself and because its ideology is strong enough to dominate in certain areas, the masses are beginning to control child-rearing, even taking some parts of it into their own hands. As a result there is no longer a monopoly of State specialists in this field - notably in the education system, but also in the ancillary medical or mental health services and so on. This is the significance of the entry of the working class into hospitals and offices as well as into schools and universities, in the form of workers' propaganda teams responding to Mao Tse-tung's appeal: 'The working class - and not just its party or its army - must exercise leadership in everything.'
But we should not jump to the conclusion that the Chinese workers' State is disintegrating. Indeed it could be said that it has never been stronger. But its strength is different from the strength of all repressive States because it is derived from mass power and the continuously reinforced capacity for social leadership that the working class and its allies now exercise. The Cultural Revolution demonstrated to a striking degree that an increase in mass power is always the result of a ruthless struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. And the more this power grows, the more the State machinery loses its monopoly of leadership. And the more the State machinery loses its monopoly, the stronger the State becomes as the instrument and expression of the power of the workers and of the masses.
'Political' experts no longer have a monopoly, of leadership. As the masses' ability to lead increases, so the need for leadership decreases; the machinery of leadership is cut back and simplified at all levels and the different forms of organization of the masses take over an increasing number of functions.
Today we are beginning to understand how bourgeois ideas of education succeed in transforming the majority of children into the submissive beings we know. But we should also be aware of the other means which the bourgeoisie has of preventing children from acquiring the proletarian point of view.
Broadly speaking, there are two ways of maintaining the inferior status of the proletariat. They can either be forbidden access to the academic 'reserves' of science, technology, philosophy and art, being told that they are not really bright enough; or, conversely, they can be told that their intelligence is intuitive and innate, that they can draw all necessary knowledge from their current experience, and that therefore it's not worth their while to poke their noses into scientific or philosophical matters. These recommendations are accompanied by calls to destroy schools, universities and institutes. All this is done with the aim of preventing the proletariat from acquiring any experience through the reform of these areas and the transformation of the intelligentsia, who will have been the sole officiators.
The revisionists in China, the spokesmen of the bourgeoisie, have held these two attitudes one after the other. They held the first before the Cultural Revolution, switching to the second while it was taking place as a diversionary ploy. This was an attempt to remain in power while concealing their policy of capitalist restoration under the guise of an ultra-left line.
Similarly, bourgeois society has two ways of preventing children from shaking off their infant status.
The first has already proved itself historically in the authoritarian and 'scholastic' capitalist education system, with its ideology of talent, its separate educational streams and, most of all, the absolute dichotomy between school 'work' and production and between the model purity of scientific research and the reality of the class struggle. So familiar are the products of this system, that further details are unnecessary.
But bourgeois society has yet another technique up its sleeve, and a much more devious one - devious because to all intents and purposes it is diametrically opposed to the established system, yet its practical results are identical. It is represented by the policy of free and undirected self-education of children. But here, too, the old bourgeois theory of human nature is at work. The idea is that children's repression is like a spring being compressed: remove the force that holds them back and they will bounce back into their natural shape.
What could be more left-wing in appearance than aiming to free children from all restraints and even from any outside interference? As its name suggests, self-education dispenses with instructors, allowing the children to be their own teachers. But just as unsupported bodies in tree fall are attracted by the earth's gravitational pull, so the unhindered child in a 'free' school will be attracted by the dominant force of bourgeois ideology - and perhaps with even more insidious results. Indeed nothing works better at concealing the backstage educators, society's rulers, than a theory which claims that there are no educators. Society is still there, and there are always educators. It's better that they should give their names and show their faces.
In the Soviet Union in the twenties many and varied educational exrcrimcuts were made. These efforts and the ideas behind them, although displaying several genuinely left-wing aspects, often carried with them a certain number of mistaken attitudes. The ideological lines that were then being drawn didn't come out of thin air. They were born of the experience that progressive educational groups had gained while fighting Tsarism. But these positions didn't constitute a definitive proletarian point of view on schools and education. The masses hadn't yet had a chance to ponder these questions within their own experience, or to verify the correctness of certain ideas, or to develop new ideas and criticize mistaken attitudes. Many idealistic viewpoints, and especially those held by bourgeois democrats, had been taken simply and uncritically from educational trends in the West (from Dewey, for example). The struggle against quasi-feudal and ultra-repressive tsarist education reinforced the idea, which is especially noticeable in the work of Blonsky and Lepechinsky, that a child's nature had to be freed from outside influence and allowed full expression. Clearly, the best way to do this is to ensure that nothing in children's 'environment' can control their education, because that would misshape, repress and suppress their rich nature.
Shatsky, a typical example of a non-Bolshevik progressive educationalist, gives a very clear illustration of this sort of deviation. He was a firm proponent of the theory of education for its own sake and experimented with children's communes run by those who lived there, applying the principle of complete autonomy for children. The experience of these communes should have revealed the erroneous character of idealist presuppositions about children's 'nature'. They were a complete failure.
For one thing, none of these children's communes managed to dispense with teachers altogether, and children's education was directed, not by the proletariat and society as a whole, but by specialists acting on their behalf. Moreover, even though they had been isolated in order to protect them from 'evil influences' and to offer them the 'protection' that was thought necessary to the generation of egalitarian communist principles, it soon became clear that these societies of children were reproducing the prevalent features of class society. Typically bourgeois forms of ideology appeared, and the children, since they were more radically cut off from the ongoing struggles against the bourgeoisie than usual, were even less able to fight them. Krupskaya was eventually led to oppose the right of these children to hold courts of justice and inflict punishments. 'Because,' she said, 'these courts purely and simply reproduce adult courts of law, even if no adults take part in them.'
We know how children's gangs will spontaneously reproduce relationships of bourgeois discipline and oppression. Little boys and little girls who go to the same school and who have never been explicitly told about the inferiority of women will quite and quickly reproduce among themselves the pattern of male superiority, so that, for example, girls are excluded from the noble games of war and marbles. Furthermore, the friendships between boys and girls will precisely imitate the ultra-conventional models of society. Little boys, like men, have straightforward friendships, playfully aggressive, faithful but not mawkish, like those their fathers formed during the war. Little girls' friendships are petty, full of jealousy and possessiveness, friendships for ever and ever until the first peccadillo turns them into savage hatreds. Just like mummy's friends!
The wonderful world of childhood? What utter nonsense! The reality is a world in which all our society's laws, contradictions, struggles and moral values can be founts. Children may be kept apart from society, but they are still hampered by their inevitable dependence on adults and know only their obligations to society. They know nothing of the few rights they have, or of the means they have to fight against that society. Of course there can be no handier situation for making sure that any prejudice necessary to society will be accepted as divine and eternal law, and for inspiring docile submissiveness and blind obedience.
Once again, everything seems to be for the best in the best of all capitalist worlds. Schools and families seem to share happily the task of turning the child into the sort of citizen capitalism needs. But this is only on the surface. Between the educational machinery and the family there is not only a division of the labour of repression, there are also violent contradictions; and particularly, of course, contradictions between the school and the working-class family. Not to see this is tantamount to depriving the revolution of one of its key levers in the class struggle. The equation of the question of children with the question of the future is just as valid for us as it is for a socialist country. A revolutionary movement that does not recognize the importance of children's liberation is a suicidal movement, and, in the last analysis not a revolutionary movement at all.
To see in children only the work that they create and the resulting slavery that women endure is a profoundly reactionary view in two senses. Firstly, it ignores the fact that the revolution's ultimate goal is the emancipation of all humanity, including children. Secondly, it carefully hides the fact that while children are a source of work, anxiety and anguish for their families, and mainly for their mothers, they are above all the victims of often unintentional maternal repression. Nevertheless it is still true that 'We've had enough of kids and work and washing' is a deeply reactionary slogan which puts oppressed children, capitalist exploitation and domestic oppression in the same category. It confuses what one must struggle against with those who one must struggle with and for. It's the slogan of the nihilist petty-bourgeois, who, although oppressed, is incapable of conceiving of a revolutionary project which would radically alter his or her condition.
It is inconceivable that a revolutionary women's movement could ignore the question of children, just as it is inconceivable that a proletariat which ignores the other sectors of society could hope to take any revolutionary movement to a successful conclusion. We have no right to demand equality between people if we don't immediately take up again the question of the relations of oppression that bind us to children.
There are many people who, while conscious of the importance of children, fail to make the proper analysis of the causes of children's oppression. The women's movement is mistaken when it sees this oppression as solely the consequence of the existence of family units producing selfishness and private interest. Of course the bourgeois family (i.e. a unit which functions in bourgeois society, and not necessarily a unit whose members are from the bourgeoisie) produces such an ideology. But that's not because of its nuclear structure, nor because of the official monogamy among parents, nor because children live with their parents - all of which are Women's Liberation Movement arguments. If the family 'runs on selfishness' it's because selfishness is an inherent and necessary feature of capitalism. The Cultural Revolution clearly exposed this fact, as can be seen in the slogan of the time: 'Fight self and criticize revisionism.' Selfishness is nothing less than bourgeois ideology. And bourgeois ideology is created by capitalism; it is a result of the way in which the capitalist system produces all the material conditions of life, including the family structure itself. The self-centredness engendered by the family is an effect and not a cause of capitalist and other exploiting societies. As long as the wage system exists, as long as that relation between labour power expended and the 'damages' paid in the form of wages survives, there will be a material basis for selfishness to exist and develop. And this basis remains throughout the period of transition from capitalism to communism, even though it is enfeebled and withering away.
It is thoroughly idealistic to imagine that forming a commune where several couples and their children live together will affect this situation to any appreciable extent. At best, familial selfishness will be replaced by communal selfishness. Anyone in need of convincing has only to observe how quickly communes turn in on themselves and devote themselves to their own internal problems, isolating themselves from society and in so doing repeating the pattern they criticize in the conventional family. To the extent that the adult members of a commune fail to live in complete autarchy and still have contacts with society, they are inevitably bearers of the dominant ideology. And even if the children were cut off from society apart from these adults - an absurd situation if they are claiming to struggle against sectarian clannishness - that contact alone would be enough to reproduce in those children the most marked features of the society their parents have fled from. The situation is exactly the same as when those exceedingly possessive mothers, steeped in the rights of motherhood, spend their days alone with their children shielding them against the rest of the world and doing so in the most implacable and authoritarian way possible.
The only logical solution to this problem would be to abandon children on some desert island - but Rousseau thought of that. Assuming that they were able to survive, we would still have to have the most backward notion of 'human nature' to believe that these noble savages far from 'the consumer society' would develop all the innate virtues, all the natural aspirations to generosity and unselfishness that society represses. In reality, these children would be neither noble nor ignoble in the way that people usually understand those words. They would forge ideas, feelings and valises for themselves, dictated by nothing more than the material circumnstances of their existence. And if they were subjected to the prime daily necessity of fighting for survival, they would consider any means of achieving that to be just - including violence to protect 'their' food or their' hunting grounds.
I have no intention of rewriting the history of humanity. The choice has to be posed in these terms: either we agree that children are odiously repressed by society, as we were before them; or we change society so that it no longer represses children. And if people really feel a deep need for revolt in the face of the 'infant human condition' - and they do - they must eventually realize that the causes of this condition lie in the organization of society, and thus that the only course is to overthrow that organization.
I realize that the majority of those who try out the communal experiment are convinced of the need for the revolution 'in general terms'. They will retort: 'We know all that already. We don't claim to be destroying capitalism in setting up communes, but if we are to create the revolution we just have to make an initial break with the dominant ideology in certain key areas. Children are an integral part of the revolution. We can't say, "First, we must make the revolution, and then we'll think about the children."'
And they'd be right! The need to break with the status quo is as urgent for children as it is for women or for anyone else. You could say that this need is so urgent that the one prerequisite of any revolution is to satisfy it. But that means precisely that we must actively oppose the bourgeoisie now, on various fronts.
Where children are concerned this means that, in the first place, women and teachers must see the young as a political force that stems from their rebellion against their specific experience of oppression. Let's apply ourselves to the task of providing the means of systematizing this rebellion and assisting its transition from an individualistic to a collective revolt. Let's apply ourselves to the task of helping to expose the roots of their subordination, so that they can progress from truancy to the struggle against the education system. Let's unite with them against our common enemies: the state machinery, for example, which takes them away from their parents not so much to free them from parental authority as to exercise its own authority directly. Let's demand that the responsible care of children should be wrested from the control of establishment specialists and the educational apparatus and put into the hands of parents and the children themselves Let's stop treating children as incompetent, unable to grasp the significance of our ideas, and let's show them the reality of our society, so that they can understand the other forms of oppression that people suffer, and thus broaden and deepen their social awareness.
The history of all revolutionary movements demonstrates that children are capable of extraordinary political awareness. They are capable of rebellion not only against what oppresses them, but against everything that oppresses the people. They are moved to boundless enthusiasm by just causes. Witness the daily examples of Indochina, the Middle East, Black America and Ireland.
How could we doubt it? After all in 1968 we in France saw thirteen-year-olds organize collective teams to look after the younger children so that their parents could occupy a factory. We saw schoolchildren fighting alongside students and workers on the barricades in May 1968, and organizing action committees in which the average age was sometimes under thirteen. More recently we have seen first-formers in the secondary school at Hurst fight like tigers for their teacher to be reinstated - a fight which created a panic in the Departments of the Interior and Education. For once, as one of those first-formers said, they had a teacher who respected them, who told them about life and reality. Obviously this rebellion cannot happen spontaneously - otherwise it would have happened before.
In the first place, children must be involved in extensive and repeated inquiries into the direction their studies should take. Women, as children's first teachers, must resolutely apply themselves to that task - they have a very important role to play in this. We women must be convinced that we are not only repressed, but also repressing. As long as we deny our role, even if we don't deliberately choose it, we shall never be able to understand kids' aspirations or to help them. A woman who oppresses a child will never be able to free herself. If they are to be emancipated themselves women must help children to become emancipated - their fates are inextricably linked.
Clearly, as you can guess, I do not claim to set out a 'programme' here. Anyhow, what would be the aim behind it? Everything remains to be done: inquiries, experiments, struggles, debates and studies. And they must be somewhat more specific than what I've done here. The ideas that I've expressed here may be mine alone, and may even be quite mistaken. And yet, in the last analysis, that doesn't matter much. They will be criticized and that's a good thing for a start. In discussing the topic of children in China and all the questions which have a bearing on it, I've tried to show that, far from losing sight of the concerns of women's emancipation, this attempt to understand the problems of child-rearing and education has kept us at the centre of our subject.