I CAN'T remember his name, but the man himself I remember very well. A shaved head; a low tone of speech; a shy manner; frail and tired looking - such is my recollection of the head of the Education Department of the Border Region government, whom I shall call Old Wang.

　　Wang was a respected teacher of landlords' children until in the middle of the Japanese war he suddenly wearied of the scions of the rich and gave up his home and the presidency of a normal school to stake his future with a guerrilla band. Born in south Hopei, he was the only son of a peasant family. By various sacrifices his parents sent him through middle school. When he wished to continue his studies in Peiping, his father ruefully showed him his empty purse. Wang applied to the family's dearest friend, a rich neighbor, for a loan.

　　"You have no independent position in society and there is no guarantee you could pay me back," said the rich neighbor and turned down Wang's request.

　　That a neighbor who was so friendly in normal times should refuse him in his hour of need gave Wang a harsh impression. Believing he had seen "the real face of the rich man," Wang ran away from home, sweated at odd jobs and continued his education until at last he became a teacher. Within a number of years, he became head of a middle school and then president of a normal school.

　　Before seeing how Wang's theories worked out in practice, a few words ought to be said about the difficulties of education in this region of China. Although on the plains, perhaps 90 per cent of the people were illiterate, they were far more culturally advanced to begin with than the primitive people in the mountains. There, some of the people not only believed in fox goddesses, devils and ghosts of all kinds, but they were often in the grip of village witches who fostered in them superstitions and fears that had died out a thousand years ago in other parts of the world. The people had no toothbrushes, hated to wash their hands or faces or cut their nails or hair. No woman could bob her hair and very many had bound feet.

　　Illiterate, suspicious, somewhat afraid of the outside world, the peasant was interested not in ideas, not in humanity, not in civilization, but only in himself, his own mud-walled little world.

　　How teach this ignorant human beast of burden anything? How teach him, for example, those terribly complex Chinese characters that the scholars and the wealthy had monopolized for centuries so that they dominated the political and social life of the empire. How drive into the head of a manure-stinking, ghost-believing peasant a bunch of Chinese characters that he did not want to learn and that hitherto he had got along without?

　　How indeed? It was something the Kuomintang, with all their fine teachers, with their students returned from England, France and America, had not been able to do. A number of years before, James Yen, an American-returned student, had attracted considerable attention because he had established a model mass-education scheme in Tinghsien County in Chiang Kai-shek's areas. But of what use are models, when the problem is to teach millions how to read and write? Not children, but adults.

　　The Communist solution was both simple and typical. They combined education with life. Instead of drilling the peasant in school (except in winter), the Communists began teaching him how to read by showing him characters connected with his daily life and occupation. Thus a shepherd would be taught the characters for sheep, dog, stick, grass and so on. A farmer would learn the characters for field, millet, wheat, mule and the like. The methods of teaching were also as ingenious as they were pleasant. A school child would go around at the noon recess to the homes of five or six housewives and paste on the front door, the living room table, and the kitchen stove the characters for each of those objects. While continuing to do her work, the housewife would memorize the characters. The next day, the schoolboy would bring three new characters. Or, as I saw, a farmer plowing in his field would put up one character on a big board at each end of the field. Thus, going back and forth all day, even his primitive mind could grasp the complex convolutions.

　　In village after village I have seen these clods of the soil, hitherto barred from any education, poring over lessons, trooping to the winter schools, watching rural dramatic teams perform on the threshing ground, listening to newscasts broadcast through hand megaphones, and studying the slogans painted on the walls, spelling them out in their tortured but patient way.

　　While not so dramatic as their accomplishments in adult mass education, the Communists had made advances in educating children in school (1) that might have a more lasting effect. Here, too, the difficulties had been enormous. Since there were no charts or maps to teach geography, the teachers sometimes had to draw them from memory, often with resulting mistakes. Because of the shortage of books, the teachers had to prepare lesson sheets not only for the children but for themselves. In the mountains almost everything had to be mimeographed or stone-block lithographed. Students made their own ink brushes. Paper was short, but due to the revival of handicrafts not so short that students could get out of doing their homework. Professors in the colleges had to teach physics without any apparatus and chemistry without laboratory experiments. Yet, considering the human and physical material they had to work with, it seemed to me that Border Region teachers were accomplishing miracles.

　　According to Wang, there were 2,200,000 students in the Four-province Border Region, 65 middle schools, 1500 higher primary schools, 17,162 primary schools, 2 colleges and 1 university. This last - North China University - was not established until 1946 and then in a borrowed mission compound in the city of Singtai, from which it was later moved to the mountains in order to avoid bombings. Originally, there were only one hundred students but by the end of 1946, there were thirteen hundred, practically all of whom had run away from Peiping and other cities in Chiang Kai-shek's hands to study in the Liberated Areas.

　　The life of these students was very hard, but none of them was starving and I never heard of any co-eds forced into prostitution to get funds to continue school, as I know many were in Kuomintang areas. Students were given sixty catties [about 90 pounds] of grain a month (more than government officials) of which they generally used half to feed themselves and the rest to buy books, clothes and school materials. Every one of them had to do some kind of production such as working in the fields or making some useful handicrafts. An example of the strict life of a student can be seen from a special school at Linching where the daily curriculum included four hours of classwork, three hours of "Self-study" and five hours of production.

　　The university had six colleges: medical, economic, engineering, arts and letters, education and government. Of the 240 faculty members, most were from the old Liberated Areas, but there were a few from Kuomintang territory who had run over when they were put on Chiang Kai-shek's black list. Many of the faculty members had no previous experience and were recruited from among cadres. Thus the head of the engineering college was a practical engineer who had never taught before. The teachers in the government and finance colleges were men who had been cadres in the Japanese war. What these men lacked in professional ability, they more than made up for in practical experience. This university, however, was little more than a luxury. The backbone of the Communist educational system lay in the primary schools, which must have accounted for at least 8o per cent of all the Border Region students. I saw these schools everywhere, in the mountains, in the plains, in large villages and small villages, in temples and in ex-landlords' homes. In Yehtao while I was there I saw children eight and nine years old climb to the peak of a hill and tear down, stone by stone, an ancient temple which the Japanese had used as a lookout post in the war. Laughing and shouting they carried the bricks downhill, piled them up in the schoolyard before their teacher and then the next day began to build themselves a school building.

　　In another village of four hundred families, which had not had any schools for some years, I found, not one school, but two, with 150 boys and 170 girls. A retired schoolteacher had started these schools on his own initiative. Because parents could not afford to lose the labor of their children in the fields, they at first were cold to the idea of sending their children to study. So the teacher took two boys and one girl and taught them how to spin thread and to make hair nets. The first day the girl brought home five hair nets she had made and gave them to her parents who promptly sold them to village women for fifty dollars (US five cents) apiece. Seeing that their children could earn money and help out with home expenses, even while studying, other parents sent their children to the school. Thus, by unconsciously applying Wang's theory that education should not be divorced from life, this teacher had not only been able to revive learning in the village, but to guarantee that the farmers would not lose by releasing their children from home and field labor.

　　What did these children study? Was there any political indoctrination? In the middle schools, yes; in the primary schools, surprisingly little. Two hours each week in middle schools were devoted to a study of current events. Material came from newspapers and from lectures given by county magistrates to teachers and village leaders. The subject matter of these meetings was written in prose and verse on village blackboards. Generally it concerned the course of the war, the assurance of victory and sometimes the causes of the war. It was not uncommon to see a schoolboy telling a group of six or seven women that "our People's Army has crossed the Yellow River" or that "Chiang Kai-shek won't give the people democracy and is a dictator."

2. When Li Fang was class leader, he liked to fight.
Teacher said: "Discuss problems reasonably, it is wrong to fight."

Li Fang would not change. The whole class held a criticism meeting and gave him their opinions, but he would not change. When the classmates saw he would not reform, they held a meeting and deposed him.

　　On government

　　Teacher said: "Our border region has realized democracy. Whether big things or small things, all has been done in accordance with the mind of the people. We have accomplished reduction of rents and taxes. Poor people and rich people are all producing enthusiastically and many labor heroes have appeared. Here, firstly, there are no greedy and avaricious officials; secondly, there are no overbearing landlords and corrupt gentry; thirdly, there are no bandits, and fourthly, there are no beggars. In fact, the evil phenomenon of the outside areas are all absent here. We not only have regular troops, but also militia. We not only have primary schools and middle schools, but also North China University. The villages also have schools for adults and dramatic troops. The lao pal hsing [the common people] are studying at every opportunity and are making progress and enjoying a life of freedom and happiness."

　　Lady Wang and Young Lady Li have little feet like red peppers. They cannot farm land; they cannot carry water, and they walk one step, sway three times and topple over when the wind blows. Third Sister Chang and Liu Yu-lin have natural feet that are big. They go down to the river to carry water, go up the mountain to cut kindling, and plow the land to plant crops. They are just like males.