Volume 2: The crown and the hat are all over the capital, and the spirit is full of energy and enter the foggy city Chapter 154 Black School
Chapter Subtitle: This chapter has no subtitle
China's first technical vocational school appeared in Shanghai in 1917. In May 1917, Huang Yanpei contacted 48 well-known figures in education and industry, including Cai Yuanpei, Zhang Jian, Yan Xiu, Shen Enfu, Jiang Menglin, and Mu Ouchu, to establish the China Vocational Education Society in Shanghai.
This is the first national educational group in China's modern educational history to research, advocate and implement vocational education.
In September 1918, the Vocational Education Society rented a seven-and-a-half-acre piece of barren land near Lujiagang in Nanshi, Shanghai, built school buildings, and founded the China Vocational School, which was also the first full-time vocational school in China.
After returning to China in 1922, Yuan Yanshu served as a professor at the China Public School for a period of time. Under his leadership, an industrial and technical college was established within the school. This college, strongly supported by Herbert Hoover, then U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Director of the U.S. Relief Administration, and his wife, Lou Hoover, was named the Hu Hua Institute of Technology.
He then invited Zhang Yuanji, Zhang Dongsun, Yu Qiaqing, the Rong brothers, and others to co-found the Huhua Vocational School affiliated with , known as the Huhua School for short. This was China's second full-time vocational school.
As a full-time vocational school primarily focused on training mid-level technical and management personnel for industry and commerce, Huhua School offered courses in ironwork, carpentry, lathe work, enamel, machinery, food processing, petroleum and mining machinery, and industrial accounting. The school adopted a part-time work-study system.
The food processing and industrial accounting majors specifically recruit female students.
Mr. Yuan published an article in the newspaper, declaring that the purpose of establishing the school was to recruit young people from poor families who were willing to learn and endure hardships, to start from practice, to combine industry, academia and research, and to train qualified workers to gradually form a technical echelon.
However, unlike the China Vocational School, Huhua School has been controversial since its inception, and has even been criticized by some as a "black-hearted school obsessed with money."
The reason is that while students at Huhua School receive free education, free food, lodging, and clothing, they are required to sign employment contracts with the school for a specific number of years. These contracts stipulate that after graduation, students must work in a factory designated by the school for three to five years, receiving only a meager living allowance during that time. This effectively amounts to a compulsory student loan.
Another point of criticism was that these teenage students spent at least half of their study time working in the school-run factory, and apart from the food allowance, they received no wages at all. This was regarded by progressive people at the time as a "sweatshop" that "abused child labor."
However, what some people saw as the brutal "exploitation" of capitalists became "good news" in the eyes of ordinary people in the areas around Shanghai at that time.
Parents who sent their children to the school saw it as a way to help their children find a future after graduation. Not only did they not have to pay for it, but they also didn't have to worry about their children finding suitable jobs after graduation. Remember, at the time, parents had to give a generous gift to allow their children to become apprentices. In comparison, the conditions at Huhua School were truly exceptional.
Furthermore, the meals provided by Hu Hua School were considered luxurious for ordinary people at the time. Breakfast included a glass of milk, lunch included an egg, dinner was guaranteed to include meat, and snacks and desserts were also provided. Furthermore, the students independently researched and developed the menus, and took turns sourcing and preparing the food. This led to the school later opening an affiliated restaurant and food processing factory.
Therefore, the first enrollment of Huhua School was extremely popular. Nearly 5,000 applicants came to the original 300 places, and in the end they had to add another 200 places.
Hu Hua School was not only popular among the common people, but also because the students it trained had solid foundation and strong skills, and could serve as technical backbones in factories with almost no training, it became a hot commodity in the eyes of business owners and factories at that time.
In 1925, after the first batch of three-year students graduated, the supply was in short supply, and some people even offered high subsidies to students in private in order to compete for talent.
Encouraged by this, Yuan Yanshu and others not only opened branches in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, but also in major cities such as Tianjin, Wuhan, Guangzhou, and Chongqing. Meanwhile, national capitalists and educators across the country also borrowed from the "Hu Hua model" to establish various technical schools.
During the Anti-Japanese War, many of Hu Hua's students came to Yan'an, where they established an industrial vocational school based on their own educational experience. This school was nicknamed "Hu Hua Yan'an Branch." When news of this reached the United States, the Hoovers happily raised over $100,000 in donations for the school.
According to incomplete statistics after the founding of the People's Republic of China, there were about 10,000 senior engineers trained by Hu Hua School alone, and more than 100,000 intermediate engineers, and the number of skilled workers and apprentices was simply incalculable.
Hu Hua School also opened several school-run factories, mainly producing light industrial products such as toys, food, clothing, bicycles, enamel products, hardware tools, etc. Among them, toys and clothing are even exported abroad.
Huhua bicycles and rickshaws have become famous domestic brands. As early as the 1930s, except for "high-tech" parts such as ball bearings, all other parts were domestically produced..
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Huhua School was taken over by the Ministry of Light Industry and became a ministry-affiliated school. Mechanical, petroleum, and accounting departments were relocated to Nanjing, Tianjin, and Xi'an, while the main campus in Shanghai was renamed Nanhua Vocational School.
However, due to the inevitable leftist mistakes made within the education system after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the Hu Hua model was criticized at a certain period as "using the name of education to engage in exploitation."
Some believe that while the school ostensibly teaches skills, it actually cruelly exploits students by forcing them to work in labor-intensive factories. Some even say the students are "indentured laborers," the school-run factories are "labor factories," and the Hu Hua School is a "black-hearted school."
At that time, criticism of Yuan Yanshu was rampant, saying that he was not only a reactionary academic who promoted capitalist vulgar economics, but also a big capitalist who exploited Chinese children, and a pawn and guide for American imperialism to carry out economic colonization of China.
The Hu Hua model was thus discarded like a worn-out shoe, until a spring breeze blew in…”
——Excerpt from "Hu Hua Model in the History of Chinese Vocational and Technical Education"》
