ABSTRACT
The Manual for Secondary-School Teaching published in 1958 by the Shanghai Centre for Education asserts that history should have a very important role in education because it has to ‘establish the place of the proletariat in Chinese children’s consciousness’, ‘show that the people is the motor of history’ and ‘that Marxism is the only means by which the laws of historical development can be grasped’. Children ‘have to absorb the idea that capitalism will inevitably be destroyed and that socialism is superior’. Description ‘must be lively so that the child can feel and resent what his parents had to endure and understand why they fought back’. Children should also be told why history is taught: for, to build socialism, Marx and Lenin based their work on study of the past.
