“The accusation is always that I’m ‘reactionary,”’ he said.

Today he teaches at the private Guangya School in Chengdu, where most of the students, the offspring of China’s new rich, are headed to universities overseas, often in the United States. The school tolerates him, Mr. Fan said, because its principal is a free thinker — and has the political connections to protect his establishment.

The malaise does not only affect history, said Liang Weixing, who teaches literature at a state high school in Hubei Province. He says the education system is conservative, and bogged down with ideology.

“The actual content of the books we must teach is enough to drive you mad,” he said, singling out the paucity of post-1949 literature, from either China or overseas. Instead, “more than 70 percent” consists of ancient texts, which students must memorize to pass.

“Judging by the course work, it appears that we are still living under the imperial system,” said Mr. Liang.

What is offered as contemporary literature, like “Goodbye, Britannia,” a news-style account of Hong Kong’s 1997 return to China, or “Journey into Space,” about China’s astronauts, does not redress the imbalance, he says. “They lack linguistic and literary merit, and are stale,” he said.

Perhaps the most famous maverick teacher in China these days is Mr. Yuan, videos of whose history courses at the private Jinghua School in Beijing, where he teaches part time, were posted on the Internet by the school. The school’s curriculum director, Liu Juan, said they had drawn nearly 40 million hits.

In class, Mr. Yuan questions with humor official accounts of events like the Great Leap Forward famine, described in texts merely as a time of “severe economic hardship.” While estimates of the death toll from the forced collectivization policies vary, Mr. Yuan has taught that 20 million died, a figure he says the government does not dispute. The journalist Yang Jisheng put the number at 36 million in his 2008 book “Tombstone.” Frank Dikötter cites 45 million in his recent work “Mao’s Great Famine.”