    20

    20

    The attack on the Three Family Village quickly moved from the

    papers to the schools.  Students were encouraged to pen their own

    excoriations of the traitors,  as one newspaper put it opening "Fire At the

    Anti-Party Black Line!" Pupils made posters vilifying the scoundrels'

    names and plastered them over every available wall.  Thus they carried

    out their duty to "hold high the great banner of Mao Zedong thought!"

    The banner of Mao's thought soon wrapped itself around the

    necks of more than just the Three Family Village.  Schoolchildren were

    encouraged to find other literary works  rotting with revisionism and

    anti-revolutionary notions.  The children leapt avidly to their homework

    assignment.  But they became even more enthusiastic a few months later

    when a new directive came from above: ferret out bourgeois tendencies

    and reactionary revisionism among your teachers.

    The new task was one any youngster could apply himself to with

    gusto.  That teacher who gave you a poor mark on your last paper?  He's

    a bourgeois revisionist!  Humiliate him. The pedagogue who balled you

    out for being late for class.  A capitalist rotter!  Make her feel your wrath.

    Revenge had nothing to do with it.  This was simply an issue of

    ideological purity.

    Students examined everything their teachers had ever written.  In

    the subtlest turns of innocent phrasing they uncovered the signs of

    reactionary villainy.  At first, they simply tacked up posters reviling the

    teachers as monsters and demons.  Then all classes were suspended so

    that pupils could work on sniffing out traitors full-time.  Instructors who

    had fought faithfully with Mao's revolutionary forces were suddenly

    reviled.  Others who thought of themselves as zealots of Maoist thought

    were  pilloried  as  loathsome  rightists.      Some  couldn't  take  the

    humiliation.

    Gao Yuan, son of a Party official in a small town, was a boarding

    student at Democracy Street Primary School in Yizhen at the time.  At

    Gao Yuan's school, one teacher attempted to slit his throat.  Other

    pedagogues tried to placate the students.  They "exposed" their

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