Featured Resource:

The second installment in FAIR in Education’s Teaching About Identity series, this project explores twentieth century contexts in which teachers made grave mistakes in teaching about identity – mistakes that at the time seemed scientific, unifying, correct, and culturally necessary – but ultimately laid the foundation for inter-group hatred. 

This installment focuses on the Cultural Revolution, a program of Mao Zedong designed to “refresh” Chinese culture and eliminate elements of the culture that he deemed to be backward, bourgeois, feudal, or otherwise counter-revolutionary.  Mao wanted to dispense with what became known as the “Four Olds”: Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Customs, and Old Habits (or “Habits of Mind”). To help attack these institutions, ideas, and artifacts, Mao called upon the youth of the country (symbolic of the “new”) to rise up against and destroy anything perceived to be part of the Four Olds: this included books, art, architecture, religious edifices, music, and even traditional modes of education seen as too bourgeois, Western, or Confucian.

The results were bloody, with estimated death tolls anywhere from 750,000 to 7.7 million.