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One of the purposes of these schools was to teach the population the “correct” way to read and write. The correct way to read was to read as a “peasant” (see Heath 1983 on different ideologies of literacy). That is, one should read in an uncritical and passive way, taking things at face value and not questioning the meaning or source of the text. Many base people had received traditional Buddhist educations in a pagoda, or, in the case of women, at home, where they would have been taught through rote learning. This kind of reader would take the rhetoric of the revolution at face value without questioning underlying motives. The most dangerous kind of reader, on the other hand, was the person who critically examined the Party line and its goals. According to the logic of the Party Center, these readers were potential traitors who wanted to sabotage the revolution. They were typically “new people” who had been educated in Phnom Penh or other urban centers under the French curriculum. They were thus “corrupted by imperialistic ideas” that were anathema to the goals of the revolution.
There were also reasons for the Party to be wary of using written propaganda. If written propaganda had been widely distributed during the regime’s early stages, “new people” would have had the role of disseminating its message to the base people, who were, in many cases, illiterate. This would have posed a threat to the Party’s authority. It was therefore necessary to assert firm control over printed materials and the way they were received before large scale efforts to produce and disseminate written propaganda could take place.11 The Khmer Rouge accomplished this first by eliminating all those who read “incorrectly,” and second by educating the population on how to read “correctly,” beginning with children and base people.
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