Beginning in the coming fall semester, senior high schools in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Shandong, Hainan and Liaoning will use a new set of moral education, Chinese language and history textbooks. Schools in other provinces are expected to follow suit. By 2022, these textbooks will have been made available to all senior high school students across the country.

According to Tian Huisheng, head of the Textbook Bureau, it took two years to develop this set of textbooks under the auspices of the MOE. As a big improvement on previous versions, the textbooks have fully incorporated socialist traditions and values, traditional Chinese cultural expressions and China’s revolutionary history. The books form a coherent series that provide a natural extension to content taught in junior high schools, meeting the cognitive development needs of teenage students, he noted.

Each textbook was developed by an editor-in-chief and a working group of over 100 members selected through several rounds of stringent appraisals based on a number of criteria, including political integrity, scholarly attainments, and experience in writing textbooks. The drafts were then reviewed by over 140 top-notch teachers.

Teachers will be trained on how to use the new textbooks at the national, regional and local levels, and the MOE will keep seeking feedback from users to make amendments, Tian added.