Revolution in Education: China and Cuba in Global Context, 1957-76
Author(s)
Cheng, Yinghong; Manning, Patrick
Abstract
The focus of this article is the two countries’ educational revolutions. Paradoxically, in the revolutionary period of educational change in the two countries, the policy objective was to deinstitutionalize education, abolishing the specific structures of schools, and to reestablish education only as part of workplaces and the broader and more general institutions of society. We also describe how and why most of these ambitious experiments failed to achieve the intended goals, so that the two regimes had to retreat and restore the previous system. Our analysis emphasizes, at once, the distinctiveness of the Cuban and Chinese educational revolutions and the patterns they shared with other movements of educational reform. The Chinese and Cuban movements, no matter how innovative and unique they seemed at the time, unfolded in the context of a long-term educational debate. This was the debate on how society can best choose–through its educational practice–between equality and efficiency, and between reform and tradition. The choices between equality and efficiency and between reform and tradition posed fundamental problems that human society has faced in recent centuries and will have to face in the future.
