A number of beautiful famous villages in Lishui, Zhejiang Province, have recently taken up a new mission, becoming classrooms for ideological and political education through a cooperative programme developed by Lishui Radio and Television University (Lishui RTVU). The villages, which have made great progress in rural revitalisation, offered a wonderful ideological and political education lesson to 41 students who are members of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
In Jianchuan Village, Jinyun County, Shi Songqin, secretary of the village Party committee and deputy to the provincial people's congress, introduced his experience of rural governance under the guidance of the rural revitalisation strategy. In Lvshan Village, Wuyi County, Xu Dehua, secretary of the village committee, introduced his grassroots governance experience from two aspects: "Promoting Rural Revitalisation under the Guidance of and Alongside the Construction of the Party" and "Strengthening the Construction of a Clean Government in Grassroots Party Organisations.” In Songxi village, Pujiang County, the students (party members) inspected the rural industrial economy developed according to local conditions, which features family hotels in renovated ancient buildings. In Zhuji, the students visited a comprehensive agricultural park integrating cultivation, processing of agricultural products, leisure tourism, education and training, innovation, and creative development.
"Lishui RTVU set up classrooms in villages so that we can see the great achievements of rural revitalisation in person, which is much better than learning in concrete classrooms. What we can learn here goes beyond any verbal explanations, since the superiority of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics vividly presented in front of us speaks for itself. We felt the great import of what we learnt here," Lou Ganqiang said after the lesson.
"Our students in open education are all employees of companies who have rich social experience. When we offer ideological and political education to these grassroots students, we must abandon the traditional indoctrination method of education. We selected four representative villages and towns, and directly set up ideological and political education classrooms at the grassroots level using actual scenes of rural revitalisation and the most vivid content for the most advanced education,” Hong Yaohui, vice president of Lishui RTVU, said when describing the reform of ideological and political teaching for open education students.
The exploration of teaching reform in ideological and political classrooms is an important part of online party organisation construction, as well as the learning content of the second semester for Lishui RTVU’s Bellwether Class that launched in autumn 2019. In addition to setting the classroom in villages, the training class also invited four experts and scholars to hold special theoretical lectures, which effectively integrated theoretical and practical learning and turned ideological and political education into a vivid and profound course. The Bellwether Class is a program jointly organised by the organisation department of Lishui Municipal Party Committee and Lishui RTVU, combining junior college degree education with non-academic skills training and aiming to cultivate talented professionals who can lead development in rural areas. At present, Lishui RTVU has recruited 149 students from the whole city for its three Bellwether Classes. All the students are CPC members and nearly half of them are heads or secretaries of village committees. To date, three online Party branches have been set up for these students based on the class units.
By Zhejiang Branch