One common trope of political debate is that Communism does education well. I read it recently in the Twitter feed of a prominent libertarian op-ed writer, and it irritated me.
The libertarian was quoting a Cuban-born American man affirming the quality of Communist education, and that irritated me double. Cuban man should know better. Because there are things to praise in Communist education, but many things to deplore. And what Communist states do is not education.
Molding the “New Man”
The primary objective of Communist education is to indoctrinate students into Communist thought and behavior, or, in Commie-speak, ‘to create the New Man’. One recurring pattern has been to physically separate teenagers from their parents—parents are assumed to be infected with bourgeois habits and principles. That’s why Communist states love expensive preparatory schools, where the future New Men (and women) can be indoctrinated by agents of the state. It doesn’t work that way in practice, because human beings are complex creatures and Communism is ridiculous, but the practice does tend to alienate a number of teenagers from their families. (At least for a time. Most teenagers return to the family fold when they become adults and cannot rely on Socialism. Genetics may lose a few games, but it always wins the championship).
Education as Propaganda
Communism, being the half-thought dream of second-rate intellectuals, have always a soft spot for ‘educating’ the masses. (In one particularly hilarious incident in 19th-century Russia, socialist university students bought booze and went to the countryside to educate the peasants. The sensible peasants drank the free booze and went back to the fields so they could eat.) The fetish with teaching the masses translated into massive adult literacy campaigns, whether the adults in question wanted to learn to read or not.
Literacy campaigns were generally failure when it came to indoctrinate the peasants, who after all knew how to make a living, whether they could read or not. But it still gives to this day the remaining socialist states the opportunity to boast about their zero-illiteracy rate—which isn’t true, since that’s impossible. But the defenders of socialist states in the west point to the fictitious ‘full-literacy’ of socialist states as an incontrovertible achievement, usually in an attempt to deflect from the awful of the regimes.
Educational Waste
Socialist states turn out a lot of professionals, but can’t provide meaningful employment for them. This is a basic feature of socialism, in which the nature of a planned economy creates surpluses and shortages in all areas of the economy. Thus, a socialist state may create too many doctors for its population, but not enough dermatologists. Plenty of chemists, but not enough pharmacists, and the like. In addition, there’s rarely a meaningful career, since most of the wealth and social rewards do not come from one’s profession. The post-secondary education in socialist states is one wasteful step after another.
Socialist education is nothing of the sort. It teaches children to read, but bans books. It teaches peasants their letters, but then tells them how to grow crops. It creates professionals, but makes professions impossible to pursue. Its primary objectives are indoctrination and propaganda. Commies do education wrong.
