Combine Education with Productive Labor

It is an important part of Mao Zedong's educational thought and one of the fundamental principles of socialist education, it elaborates the fundamental way to cultivate workers both with good education and with socialist consciousness who will enjoy all-round development of morality, intelligence and physique. In January 1934, Mao Zedong clearly put forward when explaining in the general policy of the Chinese Soviet government culture and education: "education should serve the revolutionary war and class struggle" and "education and labor should be linked" as an important part of the educational policy. In 1939, Mao Zedong's inscription for the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University was as follows: "On the one hand study, and on the other hand produce. Overcome hardships and the enemies will lose hearth, and we will continue to fight and produce at the same time in the future, this is the style of work of the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University and this is is sufficient enough to defeat any enemy.” In 1941, in an inscription, he wrote: "Both production and education should be taken into account." In 1958, Mao Zedong pointed out that "education must serve the proletarian politics, must be combined with productive labor, the working people must be intellectualized, and the intellectuals must be labor-oriented. That is to say, they should also participate in manual labor, so as to completely break the situation of separation between education and productive labor.”

Mao Zedong's idea of "education must be combined with productive labor", includes the combination of mental and physical labor, the combination of intellectuals and workers and peasants, the combination of theory with practice; this idea aims to cultivate workers both with good education and socialist consciousness who are fully developed morally, intellectually and physically revolving around the requirements needs of Chinese revolution period and construction period. In order to enable the implementation of this idea, Mao Zedong also put forward a series of concrete measures: "factory-run schools", “open-door education in the communes” carrying out half work and half study, half farming and half study; taking labor education should be regarded as an important part of school education, and the time for participating in labor should be stipulated in the full-time primary and secondary schools; stipulating the time for participation in labor in full-time universities, primary and secondary schools; he urged that the system of enrolling new students and graduate employment system should be reformed. The combination of education and productive labor is the product of the combination of the educational thought of Marxism with the Chinese reality and it is the concrete embodiment of the function of education which should adapt to and serve the social and economic construction of the country; in the new era of reform, it has also played an important guiding role in formulating scientific educational policies and in promoting the development of education. Deng Xiaoping pointed out: "In order to train qualified talents needed by socialist construction, we must study carefully how to better implement the policy of combining education with productive labor on and labor under the new conditions.”