Teaching+the+Cultural+Revolution

[|Cultural Revolution] poster: "Propaganda Group of the Revolutionary Committee of the Shanghai No. 3 Ink Factory, 1969" **__Explaining Terror __****: ** An Overview and Review of “No Place to Escape: Explaining the Cultural Revolution to American Students” published in Social Education, May/June 2012, Volume 76, Number 3

In “No Place to Escape: Explaining the Cultural Revolution to American Students” Ji-li Jiang explores her experience on explaining something culturally incomprehensible to an American audience using her family’s personal experience. She was able to explain this historical event to her often bewildered classes by sharing familial anecdotes and her use of thought provoking questions. Instead of relying solely on textbooks she developed her own program which used storytelling, photos and film to explain the Cultural Revolution as part of understanding genocide as a worldwide phenomenon. Her efforts culminated in her book __Red Scarf Girl__ and her own 38 minute DVD about her experience in China. Her central idea in explaining the cause of genocide is the concentration of power: //“When power was controlled by one person, or a few people, or an elite group, this kind of tragedy could happen. It could happen at any place including your own country.”//

Jiang initially began sharing her story with the intent of having her students appreciate the good things that their country had to offer. This later changed when she gained more experience as an educator in California. Ji-Li Jiang was initially impressed with the materially affluent American lifestyle when she first arrived in the United States in the 1990s. She later realized that the American Dream also had its own little nightmares which were present in her school. Ms. Jiang asserts that even in her school in the Bay area children suffered from various terrors that were also present in Maoist China, despite the differences in culture. Her eyes were opened when eight students in her school attempted suicide.

The central issue in teaching any subject to an audience is making it tangible and intellectually accessible to them as a whole. Ji-Li Jiang actively makes her course material accessible by asking questions that cause her students to gain insight to the historical //discussion.// She included her students as part of the class, allowing them to ask questions and make statements like //“Why did your family have to put up with this? Why didn’t your family escape? Or “If I were you, I would have shot them with a gun.”// When students have their questions answered they become part of the discussion, potentially enhancing their understanding of a particular subject.

Jiang succeeds in reaching out to her class by using photos and media relating to her experience as examples. Her family’s trials and tribulations are now part of the discussion because the audience sees a real person who experienced these events first hand. The spoken word and personal experience have a power that reading from a text cannot convey. Her students were often moved to tears by her presentation. Instead of an adult teacher speaking to them, there is a little girl who they can relate to. Sharing individual examples rather than collective statistics appeals to students as thinking individuals. It can be more difficult to relate to foreign events than it is to a fellow human being when the focus is primarily secondary sources.

The use of the Socratic Method in an effort to try to understand events from the Cultural Revolution was the most effective technique in teaching this subject. Ms. Jiang’s probing questions set the conditions for self examination by the class and allowed them to see the bigger picture that she envisioned. Her two questions were //“Why did we human beings allow these tragedies to happen over and over and over again?”// and //“What was the most dangerous element that cultivated these tragedies in human history?”// This approach really brings out the “so what” of learning history. The students now have something that they can apply to their own understanding and life. Facts without analysis and understanding are useless to a student.