A viral video showing supposedly thousands of primary school students crying during a lecture teaching them to be grateful to their mothers has brought accusations of brainwashing on social media.

The event took place on May 10 at Shuozhou Experimental Primary School in Shanxi province, northern China, but the video was only recently circulated online. The lecturer, Ouyang Weijian, can be heard speaking eloquently and emotionally, teaching the young pupils that they should accept their mothers’ nagging. During the video, which has been viewed millions of times, many of the children sitting in the schoolyard are seen wiping away tears.

According to the school principal, Zhao Zhijie, it was an educational event for Mother’s Day. “Nowadays, many students don’t feel grateful and can’t endure hardship,” Zhao told Sixth Tone. “That’s why we decided to hold this event — to teach them gratitude.”

“You should all open your hearts to your mothers and accept their nagging,” lecturer Ouyang says in the video. “Only when you accept their nagging can you prove your gratitude to and love for your mothers.” By his theory, mothers suffer great pain that they cannot express in front of their husbands, their parents, or their supervisors at work. Therefore, children who enjoy years of their mothers’ love should be the ones to tolerate their mothers’ expressions of pain in the form of nagging and criticisms of their behavior, Ouyang argues in his three-and-a-half-hour lecture. “If your mothers don’t release their pain, they will get mental illnesses. If they don’t release their pain, they can’t give us more love as normal people,” he said.

According to Zhao, more than 3,900 students and 180 teachers attended the lecture. Parents were not invited, but Zhao said that they later told him that their children had been positively affected by the speech.

In reaction to the video, many netizens said they had attended similar “gratitude education” events at school, and some had even heard the same speech from the same person. “Our middle school invited him for a speech, and I listened to him another time in high school,” one user of microblog platform Weibo wrote. “I cried my eyes out every time I participated, but I always felt something was wrong after the event.”

Many net users criticized the lecture as a brainwashing event intended to promote the company’s theories and sell books. But the school’s principal denied the accusations. “I can personally guarantee that there was no commercial purpose to it,” Zhao said. “Even I was in tears during the lecture.”

In a previous interview with newspaper The Beijing News, Ouyang responded to such allegations. “If what is inside your brain is nothing but garbage, why not wash it?” he said.

Ouyang is the founder of Daoguolai Dongneng Education Group, which offers educational programs for children, teens, parents, and teachers. On its website, the company claims to help parents form a correct understanding of family education and enhance their abilities as educators. For example, the company holds a three-day training course in Beijing every month, which teaches parents how to better love and educate their offspring. The course costs about 4,000 yuan ($580) per person.

This kind of training is problematic in the eyes of some educators. “Suffering everything does not equal gratitude,” said Xiong Bingqi, vice president of the education policy nonprofit organization 21st Century Education Research Institute, in a conversation with Sixth Tone. “Asking children to bear their parents’ bad moods rather than communicate with them equally will only cause more mental problems.”

Xiong said that Ouyang’s theory is attractive to some parents because the parent-child relationship in China is often one of alienation. The parents only care about their children’s studies and forget to teach them about responsibility and independence. As a result, Xiong argued, students do not think of their parents as the ones who care about and sacrifice for them, but as the ones who oppress them.

“Though this kind of gratitude education has been criticized for years, many schools and education departments still advocate it,” Xiong said. “They fail to offer real lessons to cultivate students’ personalities, but expect that these formalized events will do the job. Students’ tears and a touching scene are all they need.”

Additional reporting: Yin Yijun; editor: Kevin Schoenmakers.

(Header image: Ouyang Weijian gives a speech at a primary school in Sanya, Hainan province, Nov. 28, 2010. Sun Qing/VCG)